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PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

Being Forthright Studies of Men 
and Books; With Some Pages 
From a Man's Inner Life : : 



By MICHAEL MONAHAN 

Author of Benigna Vena, etc. 



East Orange, N. J. 

THE PAPYRUS PUBLISHING CO. 
1908 






LIBRARY 
Twu Cooies Received j 

NOV 2\ 1908 I 

_ Copyriiint Entry 
CLASS OL 

2-2-«f OSS 

GDP 



Copyright, 1908, by Michael Monahan 





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Of this edition Seven Hundred copies were printed and the 
type distributed. 



This is No 



- \\{ 



To FINLEY PETER DUNNE 



The only art I boast is this -•- 

I too have laughed with all the crowd, 
When the rich wonder of your wit 

Challenged their plaudits loud; 

cAnd then, the jester 's role aside, 
cA finer spirit have I known, 

cA man "with sorrow, too, acquaint, 
cA brother — yes, mine olfcn. 

cA look into the merry eyes — 

Lol here are tears unshed 
That do but ask a kindred soul, 

To leave their fountain head. 

For you have more than Falstaff's mirth, 
Nor less than Hamlet's teen ; 

"Wilt weep for Hecuba" — and then 
With laughter shake the scene. 

One of God's players playing out 

With zest a weary part ; 
Teaching the sad world ho%> to smile 

'By strokes of genial art; 

Launching the scorn that blasts the knaoe, 
The jest that flays the fool, 

cAnd by the right dfbine of wit 
Gt'bing a nation rule. 



Laugh on, laugh on, dear Wit and Sage, 
The roaring crovods above ; 

Yet keep for your o%>n chosen fetp 
The 'Poet of their love. 



m. m. 



8Hew York, 1908. 



Cbe Contents. 



PAGE 



The Poe Legend I 

In re Colonel Ingersoll 19 

Richard Wagner's Romance 38 

Saint Mark . , 47 

Oscar Wilde's Atonement 54 

Children of the Age 60 

The Black Friar 66 

Lafcadio Hearn 71 

A Fellow to the Rev. Dr. Hyde 76 

Mr. Guppy 82 

A Port of Age 87 

On Letters 96 

The Kings 100 

The Song that is Solomon's 107 

Dining With Schopenhauer no 

In Praise of Life 117 

Pulvis et Umbra 130 

Shadows .... 136 

Sursum Corda 140 

Seeing the Old Town 143 

A Hearty God 148 

The Better Day 150 

A Modern Heresy 153 

Familiar Philosophy 1 56 

Epigrams and Aphorisms 164 

Song of the Rain 173 



Che poe Legend: 



Hti Unconventional Tcfttton. 




COMPLIMENT which mediocrity often pays 
to genius, is to indict it. 

So there is an indictment against Edgar 
Allan Poe, with a bill of particulars, the effect 
of which is to make him out the chief Horrible 
Example of our literary history. 

Most of his critics admit that he was a genius and deny 
that he was a respectable person. 

A considerable number deny his respectability with 
warmth and coldly concede to him a certain measure of 
poetical talent. 

A few embittered ones deny that he was either respectable 
or a genius. 

No one has ever contended for him that he was both a gen- 
ius and respectable. I do not make this claim, as I should not 
wish to appear too original ; and, besides, I am content with 
the fact of his genius and care nothing for the question of 
respectability. Or, yes, I do care something for it, if 
by respectability is meant that prudent regard for self which 
would have prevented the suicide of Poe. I'm sure if he 
were living to-day, he would never think of drinking himself 
to death. His work would be better paid, for one thing, — 
supposing that he could get past the magazine editors, — and 
then we have learned a little how to drink — the art was crude 
and brutal in Poe's day. Perhaps this is the only respect in 
which we, the children of a later generation, are better ar- 
tists than he. 

The tradition of Poe's drunkenness hangs on so persist- 



2 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

ently that many people can think of him only in connection 
with that still popular melodrama, Ten-Nights-in-a-Bar- 
room. As a boy I used to fancy that he was cut out for the 
leading part in it. And in fact I saw a play not long ago — 
in the provinces, of course — in which the author of "The 
Raven" was shown drunk in every act and working up to a 
brilliant climax of the "horrors." . . . 

When I try to call up before my mind's eye the figure 
of Poe, the man in his habit as he lived, his daily walks and 
associates, the picture is at once broken up by an irruption of 
red and angry faces — old John Allan, Burton the Comedian 
(who could be so tragically in earnest and so damned vir- 
tuous with a poor poet) , White, Griswold, Wilmer, Graham, 
Briggs, the sweet singer of "Ben Bolt," and others of the 
queer literati of that day. Each and all declare in staccato, 
with positive forefinger raised, "We tell you the man was 
drunk!" Then Absalom Willis appears, bowing daintily, 
and says in mild deprecation, "No, I would not precisely say 
drunk — but do me the honor to read my article on the sub- 
ject in the 'Home Journal.' " The saintly Longfellow, 
evoked from the shades, seems to say, "Not merely drunk, 
but malignant." And a host of forgotten poetasters loom- 
ing dimly in the background, take up the Psalmist's words 
and make a refrain of them — "Not merely drunk, but ma- 
lignant!" 

Since this is what we get, in lieu of biography, by those 
who have taken the life of Poe, it is no wonder that the 
obscure dramatist seizes on the same stuff for his purpose, 
degrading the most famous of our poets to the level of a 
bar-room hero. Whether or not it is possible at this late day 
to separate the fame of Poe from the foul legend of drunk- 
enness and sodden dissipation that has gathered about it, I 
would not venture to say ; but very sure am I that no one has 
yet attempted the feat. Even the mild and half apologetic 
Dr. Woodberry is gravely interested in the number, extent 



THE POE LEGEND 3 

and variety of Poe's drunks. Let me not forget one honor- 
able exception, Edmund Clarence Stedman, who has taken 
his brother poet, "as he was and for what he was." I do not, 
however, include Mr. Stedman with the biographers of 
Poe — he stands rather at the head of those who have sought 
to interpret his genius and to safeguard his literary legacy. 
And though (I think) he brought no great love to the task — 
Poe is hardly a subject to inspire love — he has done it fairly 
and well. 

I may here observe, parenthetically, that in a very kind 
letter addressed to the author, Mr. Stedman demurs at the 
suggestion that he brought no great love to his critical labors 
on behalf of Poe — labors that have unquestionably raised 
the poet's literary status in the view of many, and have as 
certainly cleared away a mass of prejudice, evil report and 
misunderstanding attached to his personal character and rep- 
utation. But all I mean to convey is that Mr. Stedman's 
splendid work was done, as it appears to me, less for the love 
of Poe than the love of letters. In saying this I imply not 
the slightest reproach : Poe is a man to be pitied, praised, ad- 
mired, regretted; or, if you please, to be hated, envied, 
blamed and condemned. But love, — such love, say, as 
Lamb inspired in his friends and still inspires in his readers, 
— is not for the lonely singer of "Israfel." 

I agree with Poe's biographers that he got drunk often, 
but I am only sorry that he never got any fun out of it — the 
man was essentially unhumorous. I should be glad to hold a 
brief for Poe's drunkenness, if his tippling ever yielded him 
any solace ; or, better still, if it ever inspired him to any gen- 
uine literary effort. We know well that some great poets have 
successfully wooed the Muse in their cups, but you can take 
my word for it, they were cold sober when they worked the 
thing out. It is true Emerson says (after Milton) that the 
poet who is to see visions of the gods should drink only 
water out of a wooden bowl. But Emerson belonged to the 



4 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

unjoyous race of New England Brahmins, who were sur- 
prisingly like the snow men children make, in that they 
lacked natural heat and bowels. We may not forget that a 
poet who stands for all time as an ideal type of sanity and 
genius — the always contemporary Quintus Horatius Flac- 
cus — has in many places guaranteed mediocrity to the ab- 
staining bard. 

So there was the best poetical warrant for Poe's drinking, 
if he could only have got any good out of it. But he couldn't 
and didn't; he was merely, at times frequent enough to 
justify his enemies, an ordinary dipsomaniac, craving the 
madness of alcohol; mirthless, darkly sullen, quite insane, 
though perhaps physically harmless; hardly conscious of his 
own identity. Of the genial god Booze, who rewards his true 
devotees with jollity and mirth, with forgetfulness of care 
and the golden promise of fortune, who makes poets of dull 
men and gods of poets — of this splendid and beneficent deity, 
Poe knew nothing. That spell from which Horace drew his 
most charming visions; which inspired Burns with courage 
to sing amid the hopeless poverty of his lot; which kindled 
the genius of Byron and allured the fancy of Heine, like his 
own Lorelei; which is three-fourths of Beranger and one- 
half of Moore — to Poe meant only madness, the sordid kind 
from which men turn away with horror and disgust, and 
which too often leads to the clinic and the potter's field. The 
kindly spirit of wine, that for a brief time at least works an 
inspiring change in every man, enlarging the sympathies, 
softening the heart, prompting new and generous impulses, 
opening the soul shut up to self to the greater claims and 
interests of humanity, was, in the case of Poe, turned into a 
malefic genie, intent only upon the lowest forms of animal 
gratification and reckless of any and every ill wrought to 
body and soul. 

In other words — for I must not write a conventional essay 
— Poet was the kind of man that never should have touched 






THE POE LEGEND 5 

the cup. For there are some men — oh, yes, I know it! — to 
whom the mildest wine ever distilled from grapes kissed by 
the sun in laughing valleys, is deadly poison, fatal as that 
draught brewed of old by the Colchian enchantress. And of 
these was poor Edgar Poe. 

Neither were there for him those negative but still pleas- 
ing virtues which are sometimes credited to a worshiper of 
the great god Booze — perhaps they are mostly fictitious, but 
this is a fraud at which Virtue herself may connive. I am 
very sure no one ever called Poe a "good fellow" for all the 
whiskey he drank; and his biographers also make the same 
omission. The drunkenness of Burns calls up the laughing 
genius of a hundred matchless ballads, the dance, the fair 
and the hot love that followed close upon ; calls up the epic 
riot of beggars in the ale-house of Poosie Nancy — and we 
see the whole vivid life of Burns was of a piece with his 
poetry. To wish him less drunken or more sober (if you 
prefer it) is to wish him less a poet. 

Not so with Poe, as I have already shown. He got nothing 
from drink, in the way of literary inspiration, though some 
of his critics think he did, and, being themselves both spber 
and dull, appear to doubt whether anything so gotten is 
legitimate. I hate to lay irreverent hands on the popular 
belief that "The Raven" was composed during or just fol- 
lowing a crisis of drunken delirium — the poem is too elabo- 
rately artificial for that, — and has not Poe told us how he 
wrote it, in a confession which, more clearly than all the 
labored efforts of his biographers, explains the vanity, the 
weakness and the fatal lack of humor in his make-up? I do 
not find any suggestions of drink or "dope" in the samples of 
his prose which I dislike, such as a few of his "Old World 
Romances." If there be any "dope" in this stuff, it is, in my 
opinion, the natural dope of faculties when driven against 
their will to attempt things beyond the writer's province or 
power. And there is also the "dope" of what could be, at 



6 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

times, a fearfully bad style. But I am not writing a literary 
essay. 

I conclude, then, that in the case of Edgar Allan Poe, 
drink has no extenuating circumstances, though many might 
be pleaded for the poet himself. It made enemies for him of 
those who wanted to be his friends (if you will only believe 
them) ; it lost him his money — deuced little of it ever he 
had ; it helped to break his health, and it gave him no valua- 
ble literary inspiration. Some solace, I would gladly think, 
it yielded him, and maybe (who knows?) there was a blessed 
nepenthe in the peace it brought him at last when, after 
babbling a while on his cot in that Baltimore hospital, there 
came to him the only dreamless sleep he was to know. 

t5* t5* t5* 

LL his life long Poe dreamed of having a maga- 
zine of his own and never got his desire. He 
was always writing to his friends and possible 
patrons about this one darling dream ; but noth- 
ing came of it. The nearest he ever got to his 
wish was when he succeeded in drawing into his plan one T. 
C. Clarke, a Philadelphia publisher. Clarke had money, and 
he put up a certain amount toward the starting of the 
"Penn," as the magazine was to be called. Some initial steps 
were taken, and the moment seems to have been the most 
sanguine in Poe's long battle with adversity. He was full of 
enthusiasm and wrote to many friends, detailing his literary 
hopes and projects in connection with the new magazine. 
Then suddenly, and rather unaccountably, everything was 
dropped. It seems likely that Clarke took cold in his money — 
at any rate the "Penn" died a-borning. Poe had gone far 
enough to incur a good-sized debt to Clarke — he left in the 
latter's hands a manuscript as security, which we may sup- 




THE POE LEGEND 7 

pose did not raise the temperature of that gentleman's 
finances. 

Then the planning and the letter-writing and the making 
of prospectuses, with other architectural projects of the 
Spanish variety, went on and continued to the end of the 
chapter — good God ! how pathetic and yet grimly humorous 
it all is to one who has carried the same cross, and knows 
every inch of that Calvary ! Poe was at least spared the strug- 
gle which comes after possession ; but I am aware that this is 
no consolation to the man who is dying to make his fight. 

Yet once again the chance fluttered into his hands, when 
he bought the "Broadway Journal" from a man named Bisco 
with a note of fifty dollars endorsed by Horace Greeley. Not 
long afterward Horace had the pleasure of paying the note 
and remained to the end a strong believer in Poe's imagina- 
tive gifts. About the same time that the philosopher parted 
with his money, Poe gave up his brief possession of the 
"Journal." But still he went on in the old hopeless, hopeful 
way, dreaming of that blessed magazine, which he had now 
decided to call the "Stylus" instead of the "Penn." And a 
name only it remained to the last. 

From these and many similar facts in the life of Poe, his 
biographers to a man conclude that he had no business abil- 
ity. I am not so sure — I am only sure that he never had the 
money. In fact, Poewas never able to raise more than one hun- 
dred dollars at any time in his whole life — once when he bor- 
rowed that sum to get married (and the sneerers say, forgot 
to repay it), and again when he won a like amount with a 
prize story. Yes, he got a judgment of something over two 
hundred dollars against his savage foe, Thomas Dunn Eng- 
lish, but I am not aware that it was ever satisfied — think of 
Poe suing a man for literary libel ! His usual salary was Ten 
Dollars a week — Burton, the tragic Comedian, held out a 
promise of more, but discharged him when the time to make 
good came round — and this after Poe had gained what was 



8 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

considered a literary reputation in those days. With such 
resources, to have started the kind of magazine Poe had 
always in mind, would have tasked a man of great business 
ability, with no poetical ideas floating about in his head to 
divert him from the Main Chance. 

Certainly Poe was not the man for the job — I doubt if he 
could have sold shares in El Dorado. But I do not think his 
failures, such as they were, justly convict him of a complete 
lack of that ordinary sense which enables a man to carry his 
money as far as the corner. There is a popular cant now, 
based on the success of some fortunate writers, that literary 
genius of high order is not inconsistent with first-rate business 
ability. I do not care to go into the discussion — especially as 
this is not a literary essay — but I will say that in most 
instances cited to prove the point, the money sense is a good 
deal more obvious than the literary genius. 

To make what is called a business success in this world, a 
man is required to do homage before many gods. But though 
he pay the most devoted worship to the divinities of Thrift, 
Enterprise, Courage, Energy, Foresight, Calculation, he will 
still fail should he omit his tribute to a greater god than 
these — Expediency ! 

In his poetical way Edgar Allan Poe went a-questing 
after many strange worships, and he was learned in all that 
mystic lore as far back as the Chaldeans. But he seems never 
to have got an inkling of that one universal religion in which 
all men believe, which settles all earthly things — the relent- 
less but impassive Divinity of Affairs, already named, by 
which success or failure is determined for every man that 
cometh into the world. 




I O WARD the close of Poe's life a horde of female 
poets rushed upon his trail. His relations with 
them were not wholly "free from blame," to 
quote his biographers — they seem to have been, 
at any rate, platonic. A poetess who is always 
studying her own emotions for "copy" is not to be taken un- 
awares. I think Poe was in more danger of being led astray 
than any of the ladies whom he distinguished with his atten- 
tions. It is to be noted that they invariably speak of him as 
a "perfect gentleman," even after he had ceased to honor 
them with his affections. To me there is something rather 
literary than womanly in such angelic charity and forgive- 
ness — 'tis too sugary sweet. Have we not heard that lovers 
estranged make the worst enemies? At any rate the lover of 
"Ligeia," "Eleonora" and similar abstractions was not a 
man to be feared by a poetess of well-seasoned virtue. 

Yes, I am sure they only wanted to get copy out of him 
and to link their names with his. They were mostly widows, 
too — which makes the thing even more suspicious. One of 
them — that one to whom he addressed his finest lyric — was 
forty-five. Lord, Lord ! what liars these poets are ! I give 
you my word that until very lately I believed those perfect 
lines "To Helen" idealized some youthful love of Poe's. 
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which 
Are fairy land. 
Psyche lived in Providence, which is in the State of Rhode 
Island. She was, as I have said, forty-five, an age that should 
be above tempting or temptation. She wrote verses, now for- 
gotten, and her passion for Poe was of the most literary 
character. After a two-days' courtship he proposed to her 
and was accepted, on condition, however, that he amend his 
breath — which is to say, his habits. Poe seems to have 



io PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

regretted his rashness, for he at once started on a bat (these 
remarks are not literary), as if the prospect of his joy was 
too much for him. Still Helen would not reject him; she 
merely wrote him more poetry — and the poet again turned 
to drink as if to drown a great sorrow. A day was set for 
the wedding, and he began celebrating at the hotel bar long 
before the hour appointed for the ceremony. Helen heard 
of his early start, and, knowing what he could do in a long 
day with such an advantage, she sent for him and broke off 
the engagement. This is the only instance I know of in Poe's 
entire career where his drinking had the least appearance of 
sanity. 

Before this, and indeed during the lifetime of Mrs. Poe, 
he had broken with Mrs. Ellet, a lady who made feeble 
verse, but whose ability for scandal and mischief was out of 
the ordinary. It was through this daughter of the Muses 
that the poet became estranged from Mrs. Osgood, and 
there was a beautiful women's row, in which Margaret Ful- 
ler took a hand. Mrs. Osgood was a gushing person, fero- 
ciously intent on "copy," but of mature age and quite capable 
of taking care of herself. She declares and asseverates that 
Poe chased her to Providence — that fatal Providence ! — and 
to Albany, imploring her to love him. I wonder where he 
got the money for these journeys — about this time he was 
lecturing on the "Cosmogony of the Universe," in order to 
raise funds for his eternally projected magazine. The very 
popular nature of the subject and his own qualities as a ly- 
ceum entertainer, which never would have commended him 
to the late Major Pond — incline me to the belief that Poe 
was not at that time burning much money in trips to Provi- 
dence and Albany. 

At any rate Mrs. Osgood cut him out, though on her 
death-bed, with a last effort of the ruling passion (or literary 
motive) she very handsomely forgave him and pronounced 
a touching eulogy on his moral character. 



THE POE LEGEND 1 1 

Then there was "Annie," a married woman living near 
Boston, to whom Poe addressed a sincere and beautiful poem. 
The exigencies of her case rather strain the platonic theory, 
but I do not give up my brief, mind you. I suspect that Annie 
was behind the breaking off with Helen, but, of course, he 
couldn't marry Annie for the reason that she had a husband 
already (of whom we know no more) , and divorces were not 
then negotiated in record time. Annie was therefore obliged 
to be content with the sweet satisfaction of foiling a hated 
rival — and to a woman's heart we know this is the next best 
thing to landing the man. Annie, by the way, was not a liter- 
ary person : she wanted love from Poe, not copy ; and she 
seems to have sincerely, if not very sensibly, loved the poet 
for himself. 

Remains the last of these queer attachments which throw 
a kind of grotesque romance over the closing years of Poe. 
Mrs. Shelton was of unimpeached maturity, like the rest, and 
like all the rest but one, a widow. She lived in Richmond, 
Virginia, and had been a boyish flame of Poe's. She was 
neither beautiful nor literary, and she had attained the ripe 
age of fifty years. But she was rich, and though Poe was not 
a business man, I dare say he felt the money would be no 
great inconvenience — and then there was always the maga- 
zine to be started, dear me ! Still he made love to her as if he 
was half afraid she would take him at his word — and he kept 
writing to Annie! But Mrs. Shelton was of sterner stuff 
than the poetic Helen. She had made up her mind to marry 
Poe for reasons sufficient unto herself, and she would have 
done it had not fate intervened. She made her preparations 
like a thorough business woman, and strongmindedly led the 
way toward the altar. The wedding ring was bought (I can 
hardly believe with Poe's money), and all things were in 
readiness for the happy event, when the poet wandered away 
on that luckless journey whose end was in another world. 




12 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

Mrs. Shelton wore mourning for him, and all her women 
friends told her it was wonderfully becoming. ... I 
think Annie's crape was at the heart. 

Edgar Allan Poe was a child in the hands of women, and 
that's the whole truth — a loving, weak, vain and irresponsi- 
ble child. This count in the indictment is the weakest of all. 
I should not have referred to it had I been writing a conven- 
tional essay. 

^* c5* c$* 

|HE notion that Poe was mad has within late years 
received a quasi-scientific confirmation — at 
least the doctors have settled the matter to their 
own satisfaction. I therefore advert to it in 
order to dispose of the Poe indictment in full. 
My learned friend, Dr. William Lee Howard, of Balti- 
more (a town forever memorable to the lovers of the poet), 
sets out to prove that Edgar Allan Poe was not a drunkard in 
the ordinary sense (which is ordinarily believed), but was 
rather what the medicalexperts are now calling a psychopath; 
in plain words, a madman. "He belongs," says the doctor, "to 
that class of psychopaths too long blamed and accused of 
vicious habits that are really symptoms of disease — a disease 
now recognized by neurologists as psychic epilepsy." The 
doctor fortifies his thesis with much learning of the same 
kind, and in conclusion he says: "The psychologist readily 
understands the reason for Poe's intensity, for his cosmic ter- 
ror and his constant dwelling upon the aspects of physical 
decay. He lived alternately a life of obsession and lucidity, 
and this duality is the explanation of his being so shamefully 
misunderstood — so highly praised, so cruelly blamed. In 
most of his weird and fantastic tales we can see the patient 
emerging from oblivion. We find in his case many of the 
primary symptoms of the psychopath — a disordered and dis- 



THE POE LEGEND 13 

turbed comprehension of concepts, suspicion, and exagger- 
ated ideas of persecution." 

These be words horrendous and mouth-filling, but surely 
I need not remind the erudite Dr. Howard that 

When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, 
And proved it — 'twas no matter what he said. 

And I suspect Dr. Howard in coming, as he thinks, to the 
defence of Poe's reputation, has done the poet an ill service, 
though I doubt if he will influence any right-judging minds. 
Nor am I in sympathy with the doctor's ingenious argument 
that the most strongly marked products of Poe's genius are 
to be referred to a diseased mental and nervous condition; 
which is simply Nordau's contention that all genius is disease. 
According to this view, all men of great intellectual power — 
e. g., Nordau himself and Dr. William Lee Howard — are 
insane; and yet it is a fact that the madhouses are chiefly 
peopled with the average sort of human beings. 

No, the first of American poets was not mad because he 
wrote "The Raven," and "The House of Usher," and "Li- 
geia," and "The Red Death." These masterpieces indeed 
prove that he was at certain fortunate times in possession of 
that highest and most potential sanity, that mens divinior, 
from which true artistic creation results — always the rarest 
and most beautiful phenomenon in the world. 

Mad! I guess not! but no doubt he was thought to be 
cracked by the half of his acquaintance, for that is the trib- 
ute which mediocrity ever pays to genius. The small grocer 
folk and their kind about Fordham, a well as some more pre- 
tentious respectabilities, looked askance at the poor poet 
struggling with his burden and his vision; fighting his un- 
equal battle with fate and fortune. In much the same way, 
though with deeper aversion and contempt, he was regarded 
by the successful literary cliques of the day, especially the 
"New England School" of his detestation — those thrifty, 
cold-blooded, sagacious persons who made so much of their 



14 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

very moderate talents. Mr. W. D. Howells, the leading in- 
heritor of their spirit, has a poor notion of Poe. In short, 
our poet was that scandal and contradiction in his own day — 
a true genius; and he remains an enigma to ours. 

But I do not think he was any more a psychopath or a 
madman than — bless me! — Dr. William Lee Howard him- 
self — though I will grant that, as we are now saying, several 
things got constantly on his nerves. And among these : 

Chronic poverty. 

Rejection of his literary claims. 

Success of his inferiors. 

The insolence of publishers. 

Humiliation of spirit. 

And — I must grant it — the agony induced by his occa- 
sional excesses and his forfeiture of self-respect. 

I do not argue that the misfortunes prove the genius, even 
though in Poe's case they seem to have been the penalty an- 
nexed to his extraordinary gifts — the curse of the malignant 
fairy. But with due respect to the learned authority several 
times referred to, and in spite of all the Bedlam science in the 
world, I hold to my faith that true genius is not the negation, 
but the affirmation of sanity. 

As for the literary smugs, to whom Poe is anathema be- 
cause he was a genius and also a scandal, according to their 
moral code : is it not enough, gentlemen, that you are pros- 
perous, and respectable — and utterly unlike Poe ? 




g^yEXT to the subject of Poe's drinking habits, 
which you have to follow like a strong breath 
through every account of him that I have seen — 
his faithful biographers give most attention to 
his borrowings. Hence the typical Poe biog- 
raphy reads, as already suggested, like an indictment. 

Now, the fact is, poor Poe was as bad a borrower as he 
was a drinker — he meant well and heaven knows he tried 
hard enough in each capacity, but neither part fitted him, 
and in both he failed to rise to the dignity of the artist. He 
was truly a bum borrower (this is not a literary essay). He 
never executed a "touch" with grace or finesse. Instead of 
going to his friends with endearing assurance, smiling like a 
May-day at the honor and pleasure he designed them, he 
put on his hat with the deep black band and went like an 
undertaker to conduct his own funeral. No wonder they 
threw him down ! But in truth he rarely had the courage to 
face his man, and so he sent that poor devoted Mrs. Clemm 
— that paragon of mothers-in-law for a poet ! — or else weak- 
ly relied on his powers of literary persuasion and courted cer- 
tain refusal by penning his modest request. Call this man a 
borrower! Why, he was a parody of Charles Lamb's idea 
that your true borrower, Alcibiades or Brinsley Sheridan, 
belongs to a superior kind of humanity, the Great Race — 
born to rule the rest. He never realized the greatness of the 
borrowing profession— never rose to it, to take a metaphor 
from the stage, but remained a mumping, fearful, calamity- 
inviting, graceless and hopeless, make-believe borrower to 
the last. 

For this his biographers are ashamed of him, as for his 
sprees, and this also has passed into the pgpular legend con- 
cerning Poe, of which the obscure dramatist (already re- 



1 6 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

ferred to) has availed himself. Neither the unknown drama- 
tist nor his biographers have deemed it worth while to ex- 
plain this phase of Poe's life — these are the facts and here 
are the letters to Kennedy, Griswold, White, Thomas, Gra- 
ham, Clarke, Simms, Willis, et al. Can you make anything 
else of them? And another count of the indictment in re 
Edgar Allan Poe is proven. 

I am not writing a literary essay, but I must again lay 
stress on one thing, in extenuation of Poe's inveterate offence 
of borrowing from his friends — he did it very badly, so 
badly that this fact alone should excuse him in the eyes of 
the charitable. Let us also try to bear in mind that the most 
he could earn, after giving oath-bound guarantees as to so- 
briety, etc., was Ten Dollars a week — this was the sum for 
which Burton (the tragic Comedian) hired him and from 
which in a very short time the same Burton ruthlessly sepa- 
rated him. The joke being that this same fat-headed Burton 
carried on the affair with a high show of regard for the dig- 
nity of the Literary Profession, outraged by Poe ! Ten Dol- 
lars a week! Why, do you know that our most popular 
author, Mr. Success G. Smith, is believed to earn about fifty 
thousand a year with his pen? That Mr. Calcium Give- 
emfitts, the fearless exposer of corruption in high places, is 
worrying along on a beggarly stipend of, say, thirty-five 
thousand? That the famous society novelist, Mrs. Tuxedo 
Jones, barely contrives tx> make ends meet on the same hard 
terms; and that a score of others might be named whose in- 
comes do not fall below twenty-five thousand? 

But, you say, does each and every one of these gifted and 
fortunate individuals make literature in the sense that Poe 
made it? My dear sir, these persons are all my intimate 
friends. I admire their works next to my own, though I con- 
fess I do not read them so often. Therefore, to single out 
one of these distinguished and successful authors for praise 
would be invidious, and, besides — I am not writing a literary 
essay. 




LAST word as to Poe's enemies — those whom he 
made for himself and those who were called 
into being by his literary triumphs. Here again 
I think Poe failed to hit it off, as he might have 
done. Though he labored at the gentle art of 
making enemies with much diligence, he never utilized them 
with brilliant success in a literary way (most of the criticism 
which procured him his enemies is hack-writing, not litera- 
ture) . For example, he did not make his enemies serve both 
his wit and reputation, as Heine so well knew how to do. 
The latter turned his foes into copy; throughout his life they 
were his chief literary asset, and I have no doubt that he 
almost loved them for the literature they enabled him to 
make. This is the most exquisite revenge upon a literary 
rival — to make him your pot-boiler and bread-winner as well 
as a feeder to your fame and glory. It was beyond Poe, and, 
therefore, the chronicle of his grudges has hardly more 
piquancy than the tale of his borrowings. 

But his biographers weary us with it, as if the matter were 
of real importance. Nonsense ! Our literary manners are 
doubtless improved since Poe's day; the brethren are surely 
not so hungry, and there is more fodder to go round ( I have 
said this is not a literary effort). Still the civility is rather 
assumed than real; there is much spiteful kicking of shins 
under the table ; and private lampoons take the place of the 
old public personalities. I grant that authors are more gen- 
erous in their attitude toward one another than formerly, and 
the fact cannot be disputed that they are fervently sincere in 
their praise of — the dead ones. 

No, we shall not condemn Poe for the enemies he made. 
The printed word breeds hostility and aversion that the 
writer wots not of — yea, his dearest friends, scanning his 



1 8 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

page with jealous eye, shall take rancor from his most guile- 
less words and cherish it in their bosoms against him. Write, 
and your friends will love you till they hate you ; for there is 
no fear and jealousy in the world like those that lurk in the 
printed word. Write then, write deeply enough, down to 
the truth of your own soul, below the shams of phrase and 
convention, below your insincerities of self — and you shall 
have enemies to your heart's desire. The man who could 
print much and still make no enemies, has never yet appeared 
on this planet. Certainly it was not he who struggled des- 
perately for the poorest living in and about New York some 
fifty years ago; who saw his young wife die in want and 
misery, with the horror of officious charity at the door; who 
not long afterward and in a kindly dream (as I must think 
it) left all this coil of trouble and sorrow behind him, be- 
queathing to immortality the fame of Edgar Poe. 





In Re Colonel Ingereoll 

N THIS country freedom is a legal fiction; there 
are varying degrees of toleration, but no liberty 
in the true sense. 

In England and Prussia, both countries ruled 
by divine right, there is more personal liberty 
than in this Republic, which was founded upon the ironical 
premise that all men are born free and equal. 

The battle for freedom goes on eternally — when we stop 
fighting we slide back into servitude. 

In many States of the Union there are laws on the statute 
books that penalize liberty of thought and speech. 

These statutes are mostly derived from Colonial times and 
the barbarous intolerance of the Old World. They are an 
organic link between us and the British tyranny from which 
our patriot fathers appealed to the sword. No statesman or 
legislator has the courage to demand that they be wiped 
from the statute-books. It is supposed that the moral sense 
of the people is somehow concerned in their being kept there 
— like theology, which no one is able to define, but which 
many people take to be the highest and most valuable kind 
of knowledge. 

So these cruel old laws are not disturbed by pious legis- 
lators, who would make no bones at all of trading in public 
franchises, or of acting on any proposition with the "immoral 
majority." Hypocrisy and fraud respect in these shameful 
statutes the "wisdom" of our ancestors, and still affect to see 
in them a safeguard for religion. Hypocrisy and fraud unite 
to keep them on the law-books where they lie, asleep it may 
be, but ready-fanged and poisoned should they be invoked 
at any time to do their ancient office. Many people would be 



20 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

glad to have these infamous laws erased from the statute- 
books, but they do nothing about it. The public sense of 
hypocrisy stands in the way. Legislators fear the protest of 
what is called "organized religion." Liberty continues to be 
disgraced in the house of her friends. 

New Jersey has laws of this kind. Eighteen years ago one 
of them was waked from its long sleep in order to punish a 
man who had exercised the right of free speech. By a strange 
contradiction — the result of yoking the Era of Liberty with 
the Age of Oppression — this right of free speech is guaran- 
teed in the Constitution of New Jersey, under which the old 
cruel Colonial law is allowed to operate. That is to say, the 
Constitution both guarantees and penalizes the same privi- 
lege — a beautiful example of consistency arising from respect 
for the "wisdom of our ancestors." 

The trial attracted universal attention because the bravest 
and ablest advocate of free speech in our time appeared for 
the defense. Outside of the great principle involved, there 
was little in the case to engage the interest or sympathies of 
Colonel Ingersoll. The defendant was an obscure ex-min- 
ister named Reynolds, who had gone over to infidelity. Re- 
ligion, it must be granted, lost less than Reynolds, who seems 
to have been unable to maintain himself as a preacher of lib- 
eral doctrine. No doubt many ministers have profited by his 
example and stayed where they were — the free thought 
standard of ability is a good deal higher than the evangelical. 
This Reynolds printed and circulated some literature about 
the Bible. It was merely puerile and foolish, but some people 
who looked upon Reynolds as a nuisance (which I fear he 
was) and wanted to punish him, thought it a good case for 
the old Colonial statute against blasphemy. Accordingly 
they invoked it, and hence the trial. 

The result of this now famous trial for blasphemy proves 
that a law on the statute-book, no matter how antiquated, 
bigoted and absurd — and this was all three in the superlative 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 21 

degree — outweighs with a jury the utmost logic and elo- 
quence of the ablest advocate. Such is the superstition of 
law and such the desirability of having on our statute-books 
these bequests from the blind and tyrannous bigotry of the 
Old World. 

We need not condemn the twelve Jersey jurymen for sin- 
ning against light — darkness was there in the law and de- 
manded judgment at their hands. Of course, they enjoyed 
the Colonel's eloquence; his marvelous pleading; his logic 
that built up and buttressed a whole structure of argument, 
while his oratory ravished them; his flashes of wit that dis- 
armed every prejudice; his persuasive power that almost con- 
vinced them they were free men with no slightest obliga- 
tion to the servile past. Yes, it must have been like a wonder- 
ful play to these simple Jerseymen. No doubt they congrat- 
ulated themselves that they were privileged spectators, see- 
ing and hearing it for nothing; and they talked or will talk 
of it to their dying day. I think myself it was one of the 
most effective and powerful addresses ever made to a jury — 
one of the finest appeals ever uttered on behalf of liberty — 
and it will be honored as it deserves when this nation shall be 
truly free. 

I daresay some of these Jerseymen were wavering when 
the Colonel sat down at last — how could they help it? But 
the prosecutor reminded them (without any eloquence) of 
their obligations to city, county and State. Above all, there 
is the Law — what are you going to do about that, gentle- 
men? No matter whether it was passed some two hundred 
years ago and carried over from Oppression to Liberty — no 
matter whether it was made for a state of civilization, or 
barbarism, if you please, which we have outgrown — there it 
stands, the Law which safeguards the Church and the Home 
— the law which you are sworn to maintain. 

Something like this, no doubt, the prosecutor must have 




22 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

said, but his remarks were few — he did not care to invite a 
comparison. Besides, he knew his jurymen. 

Colonel Ingersoll had made a speech that will live forever. 

He lost his case. 

New Jersey lost an opportunity. 



GREAT many people contend that we now enjoy 

in this country as much liberty (or toleration) 

as is good for us. To aim at the full measure 

which Colonel Ingersoll advocated is, in the 

opinion of these people, to advance the standard 
of Anarchy. 

By this reasoning a man who is only half or three-quar- 
ters well is better off than one in perfect health. 

Complete freedom is complete well-being. 

Colonel Ingersoll was the foremost champion in our time 
of the rights of the human spirit. 

It has been urged that he spent the best part of his life 
threshing out old theological straw, fighting battles that had 
been thoroughly fought out long before his day. Singularly 
enough, this position is usually taken by persons attached to 
the theological system against which Ingersoll waged a 
truceless war. There may be some virtue in the argument, 
but it surely is not that of consistency. 

Let us be fair. Ingersoll was no mere echo and imitator of 
the great liberals who preceded him. He had a message of 
his own to his own generation. He was the best-equipped, 
most formidable and persistent advocate of the liberal prin- 
ciple which this country, at least, has ever known; and it is 
extremely doubtful if his equal as a popular propagandist 
was to be found anywhere. 

He took new ground. He carried the flag farther than 
any of his predecessors. He fought without compromise, 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 23 

neither seeking nor giving quarter. He believed in the sa- 
credness of his cause — the holy cause of liberty. His was no 
tepid devotion, no Laodicean fervor, no timid acquiescence 
dictated by reason and half denied by fear. 

That uncertain allegiance of the soul which Macaulay 
describes as the "paradise of cold hearts," was not for him. 
The temper of his zeal for liberty can be likened only to a 
consuming flame; it burned with ever increasing ardor 
through all the years of his long life; it was active up to the 
very moment when jealous Death touched his eloquent lips 
with silence. 

It was a grand passion, and, like every grand passion, it 
had grand results. 

Heine has said that no man becomes greatly famous with- 
out passion ; that it is the mark by which we know the inspired 
man from the mere servant or spectator of events. 

I see this mark in Abraham Lincoln — in the Gettysburg 
speech, in the Proclamation and some of the Messages. The 
divine passion that announces a man with a mission and a 
destiny beyond his fellows. 

I see this mark in Robert G. Ingersoll. I have lately read 
the greater part of his work — lectures, speeches, controver- 
sial writings — and the cumulative sense I take from it is that 
of wonder at the passion of the man. Perhaps it never found 
better, never attained higher expression than in these words : 

"I plead for light, for air, for opportunity. I plead for 
individual independence. I plead for the rights of labor and 
of thought. I plead for a chainless future. Let the ghosts 
go — justice remains. Let them disappear — men and women 
and children are left. Let the monsters fade away — the world 
is here with its hills and seas and plains, with its seasons of 
smiles and frowns, its spring of leaf and bud, its summer of 
shade and flower and murmuring stream, its autumn with the 
laden boughs, when the withered banners of the corn are 
still and gathered fields are growing strangely wan; while 



24 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

death, poetic death, with hands that color what they touch, 
weaves in the autumn wood her tapestries of gold and brown. 

"The world remains with its winters and homes and fire- 
sides, where grow and bloom the virtues of our race. Let 
the ghosts go — we will worship them no more. 

"Man is greater than these phantoms. Humanity is grand- 
er than all the creeds, than all the books. Humanity is the 
great sea, and these creeds, and books, and religions are but 
the waves of a day. Humanity is the sky, and these religions 
and dogmas and theories are but the mists and clouds chang- 
ing continually, destined finally to melt away. 

"That which is founded on slavery, and fear, and ignor- 
ance cannot endure." 

^» ^5* ^w 




T IS agreed by persons who make it a virtue 
never to say what they really think, that Colonel 
Ingersoll was without influence upon the intelli- 
gent thought of the day — by which intelligent 
thought they mean themselves. 
If this be true, we lack an explanation of the fact that his 
books and lectures are selling by the thousands, both in this 
country and in England. If the testimony of the book-stalls 
amounts to anything, then the great Agnostic did not cast 
his "seed of perdition" upon barren ground. Whether for 
right or wrong, whether for good or evil, his word is march- 
ing on. 

From the Silence that comes to all men he has gained a 
higher claim upon our attention, a more valid right to plead. 
We remember that he was faithful unto death. With the 
cessation of that defiant personality, about which so long 
raged the din of controversy, men have leave to study his 
best thought in the dry light of reason. He that is dead over- 
cometh. 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 25 

During his life Colonel Ingersoll gave and took many 
hard blows — that is, he fought his adversaries with the 
weapons of their choice. 

Often it seemed to those who were in sympathy with 
much that he said, with much that he contended for, that he 
might have used softer words ; that he might have dealt less 
brutally with inherited beliefs and prejudices; in short, that 
he might have employed rosewater instead of vitriol. 

The answer to this is, Colonel Ingersoll fought without 
compromise. From his first public utterance he made his 
position plain. He never faltered, shuffled or equivocated. 
He knew that mutual compliments cloud the issue ; he asked 
none, gave none. 

But the fact really is, he was far kinder and more char- 
itable toward his adversaries than they were toward him. 
Besides, they had a great advantage in unkindness': they were 
always sending him to their hell — and he had no hell to send 
them to! 

However, I do not believe that Colonel Ingersoll would 
have fared much better at the hands of the clergy had he, 
while professing infidelity, made his declaration of unfaith in 
the mildest and most colorless terms. Euphemism would not 
have saved the Colonel, and this he well knew, having one of 
the most logical minds in the world. 

No infidel was ever so tender toward the sensibilities of 
the orthodox as Ernest Renan, who, though he left the altar, 
yet (as Ingersoll shrewdly said) carried the incense a great 
part of his journey with him. 

Renan's attitude toward the old faith which he had re- 
nounced was that of a sentimental iconoclast — but an icono- 
clast, for all that. He wrote his "Life of Jesus" with a kind 
of pious infidelity, coloring it with such euphemism, handling 
it with such precaution, that some persons took it for an 
orthodox account. He discloses his motive in the prefaces 
but almost suppresses it in the body of the book. His criti- 



26 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

cism is the best in the world, his romance no better than 
Chateaubriand's — a woman said that the "Life of Jesus" 
read as if it was going to end with a marriage! In my poor 
opinion one or two chapters of Renan's "Recollections" is 
worth the "Life of Jesus." 

Renan loved the grand old Church which had educated 
him, as his "dearest foe." His mind had been formed by 
contact with her at a hundred points. The poetry of her 
ritual, the pomp of her service, the grandeur of her titles, 
the majesty of her spiritual dominion, never quite lost their 
power to impress his soul — even when he was prophesying 
that the days of her greatness were numbered. He spoke of 
the clergy always with respect, often with compliment, de- 
claring in his latest book that he had never known a bad 
priest. He abhorred all coarseness, all invective, all vulgar- 
ity, all violence. Nothing common, low or brutal was ever 
suffered to mar the translucent mirror of his perfect style. 
In theory a democrat, he had the mental manners which are 
fostered by a clerical aristocracy. Every faculty of his mind 
paid homage to the Church, except his reason. 

Renan never lost his feeling of reverence for the sacred 
mysteries of the faith in which his youth was cradled — but 
he wrote the "Prayer on the Acropolis." He rebuked Strauss 
and Feuerbach for the ruthless way in which they attacked 
the Christian legend — he pleaded for tenderness in demol- 
ishing a religion which had been the hope of the world. He 
confessed that he never could wholly put off the cassock, and 
he seemed like an unfrocked bishop on the heights of science. 
If ever an infidel deserved charity at the hands of the clergy, 
that infidel was Renan. 

Did he get it? — not even Voltaire was assailed with a 
greater virulence of ecclesiastical rancor, the most infernal 
malice ever planted in the heart of man. 

The ecclesiastical spirit is the same in all ages. It crucified 
Jesus of Nazareth, it burned Giordano Bruno. When Serve- 




IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 27 

tus writhed at the stake in his death agony, Calvin, his mur- 
derer, drew near, saluted him as the son of the devil and 
piously committed his soul to hell. 

Renan was cursed and slandered with that special ingenu- 
ity which has always belonged to the Church, and the priests 
whom he was in the habit of complimenting, with great fer- 
vor saluted him as the Anti-Christ ! 

Colonel Ingersoll's reasoning was good. Compliments are 
vain in an irreconcilable conflict. 

i^% (5* t5* 

OST speeches are not literature — they do not read 
as they were heard, as they were spoken. Lack- 
ing the living voice, the speaking eye, the per- 
sonality from which they derived their force, 
they seem cold, inanimate, without that vital 
principle which is the product of genius and art. 

The orator's triumphs are usually short-lived, like those 
of the actor. They are the children of the time, not of the 
eternities. 

But there are exceptions, though rare, and among these we 
may reckon the best speeches of Colonel Ingersoll. 

Our American literature has nothing better of their kind 
than the Decoration Day Oration, the lectures on Ghosts, 
Orthodoxy, Superstition, Individuality, Liberty for Man, 
Woman and Child, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Humboldt, 
Thomas Paine, and some others. 

These are so vital, so charged with intellectual power, so 
instinct with a passionate love of truth and justice, so elo- 
quent and logical, so clear and convincing — above all, so 
readable — that they can afford to dispense with the living 
voice; that is, they are in a true sense literature. 

I doubt if this enviable distinction belongs in equal meas- 
ure to any other American orator. 



28 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

The explanation is that Colonel Ingersoll was an artist as 
well as an orator : he knew that without the preserving touch 
of art, the most impassioned oratory soon goes back to com- 
mon air. He was one of the great masters of our English 
speech, never seeking the abstruse or the obsolete, believing 
that the tongue of Shakespeare was adequate to every neces- 
sity of argument, every excursion of fancy, every sentiment 
of poetry, every demand of oratory. 

His skill in construction, in antithesis, in balancing pe- 
riods, in leading up to the lofty climax whicch crowned the 
whole, was that of a wizard of speech. He never fell short 
or came tardy off — his means were always adequate to his 
ends; and the close of every speech was like a strain of 
music. Rich as his mind was, immense his intellectual re- 
sources, undaunted the Hbravery of his spirit, there was yet 
manifest in all his work the wise husbandry of genius. His 
power never ran to excess; never dwindled to impotence. 

Nature, too, is economical and dislikes to double her gifts : 
yet this man was a great poet as well as a great orator. I 
have quoted above a paragraph from one of his orations, 
which is the fine gold of sterling poetry. 

Charles Lamb tells us that "Prose hath her harmonies no 
less than Verse," and we know that the speech of every true 
orator is rhythmic. It was eminently so with Colonel Inger- 
soll, who, like Dickens, often fell unconsciously into blank 
verse. Here are a few examples taken at random ; and first 
this bit of what we are now calling "nature poetry:" 

"The rise and set of sun, 
The birth and death of day, 
The dawns of silver and the dusks of gold, 
The wonders of the rain and snow, 
The shroud of winter and 
The many-colored robes of spring; 
The lonely moon with nightly loss or gain, 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 29 

The serpent lightning and the thunder's voice, 
The tempest's fury and the breath of morn, 
The threat of storm and promise of the bow." 

Nothing could excel in beauty and metrical grace this de- 
scription of the old classic myths : 

"They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire ; 
Made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home 

of Love; 
Filled Autumn's arms with sun-kissed grapes and gathered 

sheaves ; 
And pictured Winter as a weak old king 
Who felt, like Lear, upon his withered face, 
Cordelia's tears." 

This on Shakespeare, reveals the poet in the orator : 

"He knew the thrills and ecstasies of love, 
The savage joys of hatred and revenge. 
He heard the hiss of envy's snakes 
And watched the eagles of ambition soar. 
There was no hope that did not put its star above his 

head — 
No fear he had not felt — 
No joy that had not shed its sunshine on his face." 

The critics, I am aware, make this kind of writing a fault 
in prose, but we should be glad to get real poetry, wherever 
we may find it. Colonel Ingersoll's greatest distinction as a 
poet is, that he never fails to interest us — the regular metre- 
mongers may well envy him. 




LIKE his distinct literary style — the style of his 
miscellanies, of his controversial papers, of his 
occasional bits of wisdom and fancy and criti- 
cism. Perhaps the thoroughly human side of 
the man is best seen in these unrelated efforts — 
these vagrant children of his mind. You know that this man 
thought before he took the pen in hand. He writes without 
pretence, without the vices of the literary habit, without arti- 
fice or evasion, — clearly, frankly, as a gentleman should 
speak. In written controversy he was relentless in his logic, 
— pressing the point home, — but unfailing in courtesy. As 
he himself would have said, his mental manners were good 
— they were at any rate "sweetness and light" compared 
with those of his adversaries. 

He did not profess to love his enemies, yet he treated 
them more humanely than many who made that profession. 

We are never to forget that the chief article of his of- 
fending was, that he made war upon the dogma of an ever- 
lasting hell. 

In his controversies he was never worsted and his vic- 
tories seem not less due to his own fairness in argument and 
tenacity of logic than to the weakness and confusion of his 
opponents. The natural and the supernatural can not main- 
tain a profitable argument. They can never agree and, strict- 
ly speaking, one can not overcome the other — they occupy 
separate realms. 

It is useless for a man who believes in miracles to argue 
with a man who does not — a miracle and a fact are in the na- 
ture of things irreconcilable. 

Renan said to the theologians, "Come, gentlemen, let us 
have one miracle here before the savants in Paris — that will 
end the dispute forever." He asked in vain — miracles are 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 31 

no longer granted for the conversion of infidels, and if they 
occur at all, it is before witnesses whose faith predisposes 
them to belief. It may be hazarded that no one ever believed 
in a miracle who did not wish to believe in it. 

From a human standpoint — we really don't know of any 
other — the honors of controversy usually fell to Colonel In- 
gersoll. Plis apparent victories were, of course, easily waived 
by those who believed that they had miraculous truth on 
their side. Yet they must have regretted that the supernat- 
ural can be so ill defended. That all the advantage of rea- 
son would seem to be with the enemy of light. That one 
who can make himself understood should prevail over the 
champion of Divine truth, which is in its nature incompre- 
hensible. That it should be so hard to square reason with 
revelation, fact with fable, method with miracle, dreams 
with demonstrations. 

Of all these tourneys of skill and wit and logic, Colonel 
Ingersoll is seen at his best in his reply to Gladstone. Per- 
haps nothing that he ever did more thoroughly certifies the 
power and keenness of his mind, the bed-rock of his convic- 
tions. He was like an athlete rejoicing in his strength; mer- 
ciful to his adversary, as feeling that the victory was sure; 
always conscious of his power, but ruling himself with per- 
fect poise. The one touch of malice that he allowed himself 
was when he quoted for Mr. Gladstone's benefit the saying of 
Aristotle, that "clearness is the virtue of style:" this ar- 
row pierced the heart of the British behemoth. 

In truth, Mr. Gladstone, the man of many languages, 
the world-famed orator, the "most learned layman in Eu- 
rope," appeared at a ludicrous disadvantage in his duel with 
the American. He tried to write in the bishop's voice, to 
overawe his adversary with Greek and Latin quotations, 
omitting to give the English equivalent. He begged the 
question, floundered about it, did everything but argue it, 
and finally took refuge behind the "exuberance of his own 




32 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

verbosity." Colonel Ingersoll, cool, relentless, urbane, in- 
flexible, asked only for the facts : Mr. Gladstone, flustered, 
irritated, conscious of his weakness, had none to give and 
raised a cloud of words. In this world Mr. Gladstone 
never answered Colonel Ingersoll's reply — perhaps he is oc- 
cupying himself with a rejoinder in the next. 

^* t2* i2& 

OLONEL Ingersoll has been so slandered and de- 
famed by the friends of orthodox religion that 
many people have no just idea of the man or of 
the principles for which he contended. Slander 
is too often the favorite weapon of those who 
love their enemies as themselves. It was used so effectively 
against Voltaire that even at this late day many liberal Chris- 
tians are afraid to read him. 

Let us see. Did Ingersoll say there is no God? 

No; he said he did not know. 

What did he deny as to God? 

He denied the existence of the personal Jewish God — the 
Jehovah of the Hebrew Scriptures. 

He denied and repudiated the dogma of an eternal hell, 
said to have been made by this Jehovah in order to gratify 
his revenge upon the great majority of the human race. 

Did he attack Christianity? 

He attacked only the evil part of it, in so far as it justified 
and continued the curses of the Old Testament. He made a 
distinction between the real and the theological Christ; the 
first he honored as a great moral teacher and a martyr of 
freedom, killed by the orthodox priests of his day; the sec- 
ond he denied and repudiated as a creation of men. 

Did he believe in a Hereafter? 

He believed that no one could know whether there is or is 
not a future life of the soul. But he was not without the 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 35 

hope of immortality which has in all ages cheered and forti- 
fied the heart of man. 

It follows from all this that he did not accept the Revela- 
tion of the Hebrew Bible, its cosmogony, geology or moral- 
ity; nor the New Testament with its Scheme of Atonement 
and threat of Eternal Damnation — God suffering in his own 
person for the sins of the world, yet condemning the far 
greater number of his children to everlasting pain. 

What positive effect had his example and teaching? 

It liberalized the creeds in spite of themselves. 

It made the preaching of hell unpopular. 

It made for sanity in religion and enlarged the province 
of honest doubt. 

It caused men to think more of the simple human virtues 
and less of the theological ones. 

There is no doubt at all that it saved many from the mad- 
house who might have accused themselves of committing the 
Unpardonable Sin. 

It helped to make better husbands, kinder fathers, more 
loyal and loving sons. 

It was a great step toward freedom and light. It enlarged 
the horizon of hope — it advanced the standard of liberty. 

Was his teaching in any degree or sense offensive? 

Only to those who were committed to one or other of the 
creeds derived from the Jewish Bible. Still, he did them 
good, though they would not admit it. 

Colonel Ingersoll was a free man, talking in a country 
where all are presumed to be free, yet his courage, more than 
the laws, protected him. 

He upheld public and private morality and was himself an 
exemplar of both. 

He loved only one woman as his wife and lived with her 
in perfect honor and fidelity. He loved his children and was 
idolized by them. 

His abilities and services reflected honor upon the state. 




34 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

It is agreed that but for his religious views, he might have 
reached the greatest honor in the nation's gift. As it is, he 
has gained a place in the Republic of Intellect to which few 
of our Presidents may aspire. 

His crime was, that he had elected to exercise his reason, 
had interrogated Revelation, put Moses in the witness-box 
and asked for the facts. 

t9» <<?* ^3* 

OLONEL Ingersoll belongs with the select com- 
pany of the great Americans. 

He is of the fellowship of Jefferson and 
Franklin, of Lincoln and Sumner. His patriot- 
ism was second only to his passion for universal 
liberty. He loved his country beyond everything except free- 
dom. He was not a fireside patriot — the temper of his devo- 
tion had been proved in the baptism of battle. His patriotic 
speeches rank with the best in our literature : the Vision of 
War is as high an utterance as Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech 
and as surely immortal. 

He was a great American, loving liberty, fraternity, equal- 
ity. He hated the spirit of Caste which he saw rising among 
our people, and he struck at it with all the force of his hon- 
est anger. 

He despised the worship of titles among the rich, their 
tuft-hunting, aping of aristocratic airs and mean prostration 
before the self-styled nobility of the Old World. To him 
the most loathsome object in the world was an American 
ashamed of his country. 

He urged that the representatives of republics should have 
precedence at Washington. He condemned the flummery of 
our diplomatic etiquette, the foolish kow-towing designed to 
flatter the ambassadors of servile nations. 

His patriotism was purer than that of our Christian states- 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 35 

men who wish to subjugate in the name of liberty — to ex- 
pand in territory and contract in honor. 

He was an individualist, believing that equal rights and 
equal opportunities hold the solution of every social problem. 

He saw no evil in wealth, save the abuse of it, and he did 
not think it a virtue to be poor. 

He believed that everyone was entitled to comfort, well- 
being, happiness in this world. He denied that God has pur- 
posely divided his children into rich and poor; he saw in this 
the teaching of a false religious system which has sanctioned 
every oppression and injustice, and has cursed the earth with 
misery. 

He regarded pauperism not as a proof of the special favor 
of God, but as an indictment of man. 

He was a lover of justice, of mercy, of humanity. He 
was a true friend of the toiling millions and in their behalf 
pleaded for a working day of eight hours. Christianity had 
long suffered it, but he was unwilling that a single over-bur- 
dened creature should "curse God and die." 

He pleaded for the abolition of the death penalty, that 
relic of savagery. He hated all forms of cruelty and vio* 
lence, but especially those that claim the sanction of law. He 
denounced the whipping post in Delaware — and Delaware 
replied by a threat to indict him for blasphemy. 

He pleaded for the abolition of poverty and drunkenness, 
for the fullest liberation of woman, for the rights of the 
child. 

His great heart went out in sympathy to every thing that 
suffers — to the dumb animals, beaten and over-laden ; to the 
feathered victims of caprice and cruelty. 

The circle of this man's philanthropy was complete. He 
filled the measure of patriotism, of civic duty, of the sacred 
relations of husband and father, of generosity and kindness 
toward his fellow men. But he had committed treason 
against the Unknown, and this, in spite of the fame and 



36 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

success which his talents commanded, made of him a social 
Pariah. The herd admired and envied his freedom, but for 
the most part, they gave him the road and went by on the 
other side. 



This country is freer and better for the life of Colonel 
Ingersoll. 

There is more light, more air in the prison-house of the- 
ology. 

God may be a guess, but man is a certainty; men are think- 
ing more of their obligations toward those about them — the 
weak, the helpless, the fallen, — and less about securing for 
themselves a halo and a harp in the New Jerusalem. 

Ingersoll's great lesson that men can not love one another 
if they believe in a God of hate, is bearing fruit. 

The hypocrite shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Truth will yet compel all the churches to cease libeling 
God and to honor humanity. 

The great man whose worth and work I have barely 
glanced at in these pages, said bravely, that he cared less for 
the freedom of religion than for the Religion of Freedom. 
When that larger light shall flood the world — and not until 
then — his services to the cause of Truth, of Liberty and Hu- 
manity will be fitly honored. 

As for his literary testament, I find it easy to believe that 
many a noble sentence winged with the utmost felicity of 
speech, many a fine sentiment, the fruit of his kindlier 
thought, many a tender word spoken to alleviate the sorrow 
of death, will long remain. Even the professed critics who 
make so small ado of the Colonel's literary merits, may well 
envy him the noble essay on Shakespeare, the more powerful 
one on Voltaire, or the beautiful memorial tribute to Walt 
Whitman. And it may that "so long as love kisses the lips 



IN RE COLONEL INGERSOLL 



37 



of death," so long shall men and women, in the nighted 
hour of grief and loss, bless the name of him who touched 
the great heart of humanity in that high and unmatched de- 
liverance at his brother's grave. 

From a sunken Syrian tomb long antedating the Christian 
era, Ernest Renan brushed away the dust and found in- 
scribed thereon the single word, 

"Courage!" 




Richard Gdagner's Romance. 




HE story of the man of genius who finds inspir- 
ation in another man's wife is not a new one, 
and it may even be called trite, but it is one to 
which the world always lends a willing ear. 
This is the story revealed in the recently pub- 
lished English version of the letters of Richard Wagner to 
Mathilde Wesendonck. In Germany, sweet land of senti- 
ment, the book has reached the twentieth edition and is gen- 
erally acclaimed as a true classic. In Germany, also, the al- 
leged Platonic motive of the letters, elsewhere looked at 
askance, is easily admitted, since, as is well known to the 
nightingales and the lindens, a German lover will pursue an 
ardent courtship through a dozen years without daring once 
to put an arm around his divinity's waist. Art and love are 
a great patience in Germany. 

They were surely so in the case of Richard Wagner; and 
it is characteristic of the Teuton, that he has left the world 
in doubt as to whether his patience was ever rewarded. 

The doubt is indeed the chief provocation of these letters 
(outside of Germany), and furnishes the artistic motive by 
which they will endure. 

Or, to put the matter plainly, the other man's wife sup- 
plies the interest of this book. As of many others in the 
biography of greatness. 

Think you had these letters been addressed to Frau Wag- 
ner, that all the chaste nightingales of Germany would now 
be tuning in their praise? Or that our own sentimentalists, 
with the unsexed Corybantes of music, would be swelling 
such a chorus of acclaim? Would the world be eager to 
identify Frau Wagner with the conception of "Isolde," and 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 39 

should we be hearing all this patter about ideal union of 
souls, spiritual passion, etc., etc.? Not so! — the world will 
not tolerate the indecency of a man of genius loving his wife 
and personifying her in the creations of his art. 

There is not a single truly famous book in the world's lit- 
erature, of letters written by a man of genius to his wife. 

The letters are always written to> some other woman and, 
preferably, some other man's wife. Why this should be so, 
only the good Lord knows who made us as we are. 

Poor Penelope keeps house, often red-eyed and sad, during 
the excursions of genius; she treasures up with a brokenr 
hearted care and stores away in a lavender-scented drawer 
with the early love-letters (of which the genius is now 
ashamed) curt messages on postal cards — hurry-up requests 
for clean linen or an extra "nighty" ; express tags speaking 
eloquently of some cheap gift by which the great man dis- 
charged the obligation of writing ( preserved by the simple 
soul because he had scrawled her name upon them) ; and 
perhaps a small packet of letters that deal wholly with his 
ideas of domestic government, usually couched in a peevish 
tone and with a hard selfishness of intention that strangely 
contrasts with the man's meditated, public revelation of self 
— not a flower of the heart in them all, as poor Penelope, 
starving for a word of love, sees through her dropping tears. 

Now these things have some value to a neglected wife, but 
they can not usefully be worked up in the biography of a man 
of genius. 

What wonder that Penelope takes into her tender bosom 
the subtle demon of jealously, becomes a shrew and a scold, 
and presently — goaded by the man's cold and steady refusal 
to satisfy her by giving her the love which she knows with 
a woman's sure instinct is being secretly lavished upon anoth- 
er — what wonder, I say, that Penelope under such madden- 
ing provocation, finding herself a cheated and unloved wife, 



4 o PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

becomes that favorite handiwork of the Devil on this earth 
— a good woman turned into a Fury ! 

And the beauty of it is that at this moment she sets out to 
justify, in the wrong-headed fashion of a woman who knows 
that she can take her marriage certificate to Heaven with 
her, — the infidelity of her husband. 

He, being a man of genius, easily gets the sympathy of the 
world — especially of all good and virtuous women, every 
one of whom feels that she would have been able to satisfy 
the gifted person and keep him properly straight. And the 
great man adds to the laurel of fame the crown of domestic 
martyrdom. 

Of course, the injured wife might have played her game 
better, but it was not in the cards for her to win, — having 
married a genius. 



So it has come to be an axiom that the artistic tempera- 
ment disqualifies a man for the sober state of matrimony; 
and many are the cases cited to prove it, from the wife of 
Socrates to Jane Welsh Carlyle or Frau Wagner. The woes 
of the unhappily mated genius clamor down the ages like 
the harsh echoes of a family row before the policeman 
reaches the corner. Also they make a large figure in what is 
called polite literature, especially as the sorely tried genius 
finds in the sorrows of his hearth a strong incentive to the 
production of copy. Hence the thing is not without its com- 
pensations, and the lovers of gossip, who are always the 
chief patrons of literature, do not seek their food in vain. 

I suspect that the matter of vanity has much to do with 
cooking the domestic troubles — his word is "tragedy" ! — of 
the genius. It is very hard to domesticate the species, and 
wonderful is the arrogance which the notion of genius will 
breed in the homeliest man, causing him to look with easy 
contempt on the beautiful woman who perhaps married him 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 41 

out of pity. The artist is the peacock among husbands — his 
lofty soul, his majestic port, his rainbow plumage and even, 
as he thinks, the beauty of his voice — that top note especial- 
ly! — move him to a measureless disdain of the annoyingly 
constant, unvaried and tiresome hero-worship of his plain 
little mate — it is quite curious how after a time he can not 
see her beauty. To be sure, she has her home uses, and very 
convenient at times they are, even to the most glorious of 
peacocks ; but he is for the Cosmos and must not limit his re- 
splendency to a narrow poultry-yard — go to, woman! And 
there you are. 

Then, of course, the artist must be always in quest of new 
sensations, — in other words, must feed his genius, to which 
satiety is death; and it seems to be agreed that such sensa- 
tions and experiences are only to be had from other women, 
or at least, some other woman — and how are you going to 
get away from that? 

I have heard of a certain man, of coarse fibre, who would 
have given his soul to be thought an artist; who plotted 
asleep and awake, during long years, to get rid of his law- 
ful wife and take on a woman he believed to be his affinity. 
The man's passionate desire to work this wrong gave him 
a kind of power and eloquence which, strange to say, failed 
him when at last he had succeeded in carrying out his pur- 
pose. And then, so the gossip ran, he wished to win the old 
love back again (coupled in his memory with both unrest 
and power), but that, of course, was hopeless; so that verily 
the last state of this man was worse than the first. 

All of which is not without bearing upon the story of Rich- 
ard Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonck. 

I am not concerned to upset the Platonic theory, so dear 
to German sentimentalists, of the love-affair between the 
great Wagner and the wife of Herr Wesendonck. People 
will judge according to the evidence and their private feel- 
ings. It must be allowed that there are expressions in the 



42 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

letters that would go far toward establishing a crim. con. in 
the case of any but a German like Wagner and a master 
sentimentalist at that. Such a passage as this for example : 

"Once more, that thou couldst hurl thyself on every con- 
ceivable sorrow of the world to say to me, 'I love thee,' re- 
deemed me and won for me that 'solemn pause' whence my 
life has gained another meaning. 

"But that state divine indeed was only to be won at cost 
of all the griefs and pains of love — we have drunk them to 
their very dregs! And now, after suffering every sorrow, be- 
ing spared no grief, now must the quick of that higher life 
show clear what we have won through all the agony of those 
birth-throes." 

I repeat, only a German sentimentalist could hold such 
language without compelling an obvious conclusion. The 
fact that in the face of this and similarly passionate avowals, 
public opinion in Germany absolves the lovers of any posi- 
tive guilt in their relations, is a high tribute to that national 
virtue which was anciently celebrated by Tacitus and more 
recently by Heinrich Heine. 

It is the greater pity that the English translation should 
have been made by a gushing, lymphatic person, one W. 
Ashton Ellis, who instead of suffering the letters to speak 
for themselves, writes me a sloppy preface wherein he seeks 
to clear Frau Wesendonck's character, in advance, and there- 
by naturally awakens the reader's doubts. I protest but for 
this marplot fellow I should have set it all down to the ac- 
count of German sentimentalism and have laid the book 
aside without hearing anything worse than the nightingale in 
the linden, pouring forth his soul in the enchanted moonlight 
of German poesy. But now it is spoiled for me by such 
twaddle as this : 

"This placid, sweet Madonna, the perfect emblem of a 
pearl, not opal, her eyes still dreaming of Nirvana, — no ! em- 
phatically no ! she could not once have been swayed by car- 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 43 

nal passion. In these letters all is pure and spiritual, a Dante 
and a Beatrice; so must it have been in their intercourse." 

This illustrates how the defense is so often fatal in mat- 
ters of literary biography. And yet I have not heard of a 
literary man wise enough to ask that neither his memory nor 
his acts should ever be defended. 

Many a small person contrives to attract a moment's no- 
tice by defending the silent great. 

Fame has no more subtle irony. 



Richard Wagner met Mathilde Wesendonck in 1852 
when he was forty years old and she twenty-four. He had al- 
ready written "Rienzi," "The Flying Dutchman," "Tann- 
hauser" and "Lohengrin." Nobody has ever dreamed of at- 
tributing the inspiration of any of these works to his wife 
Minna. 

It is seldom indeed that a woman is credited with inspiring 
a man of genius — after she has married him. As a literary 
theory the thing is not popular. 

Wagner's wife had been an opera singer. It is admitted 
even by the great man's jealous biographers, that she was of 
more than ordinary beauty, that she shared bravely his early 
hardships and that she was a pure and loyal wife. 

But it seems certain that she did not inspire the great man. 
In his later life he was wont to say that his wedlock had been 
nothing but a trial of his patience and pity; perhaps he was 
indebted for this to his vanity rather than his recollection. 

Mathilde, on the contrary, was Wagner's inspiration, for 
has he not told us so? — though to be sure we may credit her 
with inspiring only one opera, "Tristan and Isolde." Un- 
fortunately, she was the wife of another man, but again fort- 
unately, her husband was of a truly Germanic simplicity and 
child-like trust. 

Herr Wesendonck was also a man of means and could 



44 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

give his wife the indulgence of many luxuries and whims, 
which must have added to her attractiveness in the eyes of 
the struggling man of genius. Money has never been known 
to cheapen the charms of a really desirable woman. 

Portraits of Mathilde show a Madonna-like face of pure 
and delicate outline, with eyes of haunting tenderness and a 
mouth of sensitive appeal — such lips, so sweet yet sad, so in- 
viting yet so free from sensual suggestion, are seen only 
among the higher types of German beauty. Not, I grant 
you, a face indicating carnal passion, but what then? — many 
a woman who looked like a Madonna has loved not wisely 
but too well, and some have been known to bear children in 
the human fashion. 

I have never seen a portrait of Herr Wesendonck. 

Truly he deserves one for consenting to the romance which 
has immortalized his name. Wagner seems to have felt this 
when he once wrote Herr Wesendonck that the latter should 
have a place with him in the history of art. In this letter 
Wagner says nothing of the fine set of horns which (outside 
of Germany) an evil-minded generation has freely awarded 
his generous friend. 

Mark here again the gushing Ellis: — 

"It is as a knightly figure that he (Herr Wesendonck) will 
ever abide in the memory of all who met him, and surely tru- 
er knightliness than he displayed in a singularly difficult con- 
juncture, can nowhere have been found outside King Ar- 
thur's court. Undoubtedly it was he who was the greatest 
sufferer for several years, — by no means Minna, — years of 
perpetual heart-burnings bravely borne." 

Herr Wesendonck was indeed a pattern husband for a 
young woman of romantic yearnings. 

He shared her admiration for Wagner's genius and for a 
long time refused to see that his wife was actuated by any 
other motive. 

He gave Wagner financial aid and finally offered him, 



RICHARD WAGNER'S ROMANCE 45 

with Minna, a home in a pretty cottage on his estate at Zu- 
rich. 

He tolerated the connection even after it had become the 
occasion of bitter quarrels on his domestic hearth. 

On the whole, I am persuaded that a figure of like chival- 
ry is not to be found outside of Germany, nor perhaps any- 
where since the noble Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. 

Mathilde's few letters tell us nothing — her soul is never 
unveiled — she compels us to take Wagner's word for the 
whole of the romance. Her attitude in this correspondence 
—if such it may be called — puts the great man in a dubious 
light. We may not think the less of the artist, but the man 
loses nobility; Herr Wesendonck gets his revenge. 

But at last Minna intercepted one of Wagner's letters to 
Mathilde (which is not given in this collection), and deliv- 
ered it herself, with words suiting the occasion. Naturally, 
this broke up the arrangements at Zurich; Wagner sent his 
wife back to her parents and betook himself to Venice. Herr 
Wesendonck's conduct in the circumstances was without a 
flaw: this admirable man seems truly worthy both of Ger- 
many and Spain. 



There is a harmless mania for identifying particular per- 
sons with poetic creations, and with such hints as Wagner 
constantly threw out during the period of their attachment, it 
was impossible that Mathilde should escape. 

"With thee I can do all things," he says, "without thee, 
nothing!" 

This was not strictly true, however, and must be taken as 
a poetic license, since he wrote several operas before meet- 
ing her and did some of his greatest work long after the 
parting. 

But let me not discourage the sentimentalists. It is true 



4 o PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

tli.it he said, "For Kaving written the ' Tristan' 1 thank you 

from my deepest soul to all eternity.*' 

It is also certain that he used to write his music with a gold 
pen that Mathilde had given him, and that in exile he re- 
ceived from her a package of his favorite zwieback with 
tears ot joy. Lor these and other reasons 1 would not deny 
her title to he regarded as the original inspiration ot' "Tris- 
tan and Isolde." 

Still. we have all heard ot' another enamored young person 
who. when her lover had got himself somewhat desperately 
out ot' the way — 

"Went on eating bread and butter." 

Absence, it appears, had some effect in cooling the roman- 
tic fervors ot" Mathilde. Some half-dozen years after the rup- 
ture at Zurich. "Tristan and Isolde," that "child ot" our sor- 
rows." as Wagner lovingly wrote her and to which her name 
tor good or evil is now linked forever, was produced tor the 
tirst time in Munich. 

Mathilde had the earliest imitation, with the composer's 
own compliments; but she did not attend, and the heart ot 
Minna was not harrowed bv seeing her name "among those 
present." 

It is no reproach to the nightingales o\ Germany that they 
sang longer in the heart of her lover. . . . 

And the lindens bloom on immortally. 





8aint JVIarh. 

E-ENTER the Sieur de Conte! . . . 

Our gallant old friend makes as knightly a 

show as ot yore when first he rode into the lists 
and pledged his fealty to the stainless Maid. 
But alas! his hair that rivaled the raven's wing 
for blackness., is now white as can: ,.". Vet has that 

eye lost nothing of its old fire and the years have but fc 
new strength and cunning to his hand. And methinks the 
Sieur fights with a tempered skill and a wary shrew: 
that were not always his in the old days — by my halidom. I 
would not care to be the Holy Council at Rome with such 
a champion pitted against rn<:l For indeed the tiorj Council 
may | v.v as long or as short as may please their holi- 

nesses— the world at the challenge of the Sieur <: 
has awarded the crown of saintship to Joan of Arc. 'I he 
living voice, the magic pen of the Sieur de Cor.- . orth 

all their musty raking from the past; are more than worth 
the'r pretended auth- decide the question. If the 1 

Fathers have dropped the matter for the nonce, as rumor 
now declares, the] but done the thing that might have 

been expected of thern. 'i he Church is ever too wise to in- 
vite defeat, I sue a dead-letter, too stror 
its divine right to surrender on heretic compulsion, B t 
it is here to stay forever; and shall it be moved for a chit of a 
girl who has been dead only a matter of five hundred years? 
— Tut, tut, — there is always plenty of time ! 

The Sieur de Conte ''otherwise Mark i -vainj in all that 
n the subject, has failed to : 
traordinary fact with regard to Joan of Arc. I am glad that 
he has left it to me. It is this: Since that fearful di. 



48 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

Rouen when she was led to her martyrdom by fire, she has 
been the glory of the faith and the shame of the Church. 
That is why she has waited so long for the formal warrant 
of saintship. That is why the Devil's Advocate has so far 
prevailed to deny her on earth the crown she wears in Heav- 
en. That is why the Church, unless moved to it by political 
reasons, will not canonize her. 

Ho not think this a musty old question which interests 
imly a few droning priests sitting in a back room of the Vat- 
ican, and here and there a poetic idealist like the Sieur de 
Cocite. By no means! — it is a question as vital as the fame 
of the Maid herself, calling forth champions and antagonists 
in every age. It is a plague-sore in the side of the Church — 
put your finger there! It never has been settled because it 
never could and never can be settled to the credit of the 
Church. Also I believe it is bound up with the eternal ques- 
tion of liberty, in whose holy cause the Maid fought and suf- 
fered. 

Joan of Arc was done to death by the priests and theolo- 
gians of the day, urged on by the civil power in the hands of 
her French and English enemies. I am aware that her 
death is not chargeable, in a direct sense, to the Church, 
and it is deemed likely by Lamartine that she would have 
been saved had she known enough to appeal directly to 
Rome. I am aware that, short of canonization, the Church 
has done what it could to make amends to the memory of 
Joan of Arc. To give her the crown of saintship now, would 
not restore the credit of the Church, but would rather irre- 
parably damage it in the eyes of the world. For the two or 
three hundred priests and theologians who judged the Maid, 
as well as the godly men of the Inquisition of Paris who 
damned her as a child of the Devil, were in loyal communion 
with the Church and were, in fact, part of its machinery. 
Still, it is certain that the Church, in its true representative 
and executive character, did not incur the guilt and odium of 



SAINT MARK 49 

Joan's death. But the whole system arrogating divine pow- 
ers and claiming the right to draw supernatural warrants, 
was involved in the trial and murder of the Maid; was 
judged by the measure with which it rneted to her; and is 
now of a truth dead forever to the more enlightened part of 
mankind. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of liberty 1 

A certain set of apologists on behalf of the Church try to 
cast all the blame of Joan's persecution and death on the 
English. To be sure, the English had the best right to hate 
her and to seek her destruction, for had she not beaten them 
in many battles and all but driven them out of the fair land 
of France, which they had come to regard as their own ? But 
let us be fair; her own countrymen shared to the full in the 
guilt and the shame of her death — nothing can clear them of 
that! Besides, we are not to forget that both French and 
English were in that day of the same religious faith. Not a 
single heretic took part in the proceedings against Joan, 
from the holy clerics of the Inquisition of Paris who pro- 
nounced anathema upon her, to Bishop Cauchon, that zeal- 
ous prototype of Fouquier Tinville, who sought her blood 
openly and thirsted for it with an eager relish that shocked 
even his fellow judges; or the rude soldiers who kept guard 
within her cell and probably caused her as much anguish, 
at times, as the threat of the fire. They were all children of 
the One True Faith, and the stain of her innocent blood is 
upon every one of them, French and English. Make no mis- 
take about that ! 

Indeed, we can not go astray as to the facts, and these 
themselves can not be twisted to the purpose of special 
pleading; for the whole plan of the murder of Joan of Arc, 
the carefully marked steps by which it was relentlessly car- 
ried out, the heroic but ineffectual struggles of the victim, 
the unspeakable devices resorted to, in order to circumvent 
and destroy her, the pitiless, unhalting purpose of her pros- 
ecutors, marked as with a pencil of red,— are laid bare to us, 



5 o PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

by the sworn testimony of eye-witnesses, with a fulness of 
detail and a veracity of statement which leave hardly a ques- 
tion to be asked or a doubt to be solved. It is all there — the 
conspiracy of power, learning and holiness (God save the 
mark!) against one helpless, ignorant, innocent girl. We see 
the suavely ferocious Cauchon pressing her with both his 
holy hands toward the scaffold — he was excommunicated 
some years afterward, but it didn't save the Church's credit. 
We see that formidable array of priests setting the utmost 
skill of their wits, the deepest resources of their cunning, 
against a simple country girl who could neither read or 
write a name which is now one of the best known on the 
earth; trying by every art of casuistry to wrest or surprise 
from her an admission that should send her to the flames. 

Let us be just: they were not all equally guilty, not all 
equally intent on the slaughter of the innocent lamb before 
them. Not one was as bad as the monster Cauchon, and 
to be strictly fair even to that consecrated beast, not one had 
Cauchon's motive — but the fact does not save the Church's 
credit. Some of these priests had kind hearts and would 
gladly have sent the child home to her mother; but they 
lacked the power. Besides, they were captives themselves, 
bound hand and foot with the fetters of superstition and 
devil-born lunacy, misnamed religious fervor; daunted by 
monstrous ignorance, and mythic fears of hell and darkness, 
chrisomed and holy-watered into a pretence of light and 
knowledge — aye, they were cowering slaves, branded and 
obedient to the lash, and she standing free and enfranchised 
in her chains ! 

Though I am the first to call attention to the matter, there 
are many points of likeness between the trial of Jesus Christ 
and the trial of Joan of Art. They were both sold for a 
price of silver. Both were martyrs of liberty. Both perished 
through a combination of forces political and priestly. 
Christ had Caiaphas; Joan had Cauchon, something the 



SAINT MARK 51 

worst of it. The chief accusers, the head prosecutors of each 
were priests, and as the Jews cried out at the trial of Jesus, 
"His blood be upon us and upon our children!" — so might 
the priests have cried out at the condemnation of Joan, "Her 
blood be upon us and upon the Church!" It is there yet — 
the excommunication of Cauchon and the reversal of the 
Judgment have not removed it. Something more will have to 
be done ere that Great Wrong can be righted. 

But having shown the great similarity marking the trials of 
Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, I now wish to call attention to 
a most striking point of unlikeness, which is even more sug- 
gestive than the resemblance shown. It is this: among the 
judges of Joan of Arc — priests as they were or deemed them- 
selves to be, of the Christ of love and mercy — there was none 
so merciful as Pontius Pilate, whose memory is not held in 
much honor by the Christian world; not one had the cour- 
age or the humanity to wash his hands of the intended 
murder. Some desired it out of their blind ignorance and 
cruel fanaticism ; many no doubt regretted it, as a severe but 
salutary act of faith ; all consented to it ! The responsibility 
is thus landed squarely where it belongs, on the official reli- 
gion which was then in league with the secular arm. If there 
had been the least available doubt as to that — if the damning 
record were not in black and white, attested by the solemn 
oaths of so many witnesses of or participants in the trial — 
the Church would long ago, for her own credit, have granted 
the saintship of Joan of Arc, and to-day the altars of the 
Maid of Orleans would flame in a hundred lands. But 
perhaps, since the Eternal Church does not count years as 
men count them, it is yet some ages too soon to raise an 
altar to the Second Great Martyr of Liberty. And maybe 
this is a fortunate thing for Liberty and the Maid, for on 
the day that the church makes Joan of Arc wholly her own, 
on that day she will step down from the unexampled place 
she has so long held in the love and pity and worship of 



52 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

mankind. Such a consummation would not, I am sure, be 
agreeable to her leal knight and devoted champion, the Sieur 
de Conte Mark Twain. 

In the wide court of Heaven, on any of these fine days, you 
may see — if God has given you sight above your eyes — a 
Maid who has been a maiden now during full five hundred 
years. Her hair is the color of the corn-silk at harvest time 
and her eyes of the early forget-me-not. She is slender as 
of old when, clad in shining armor and mounted on her milk 
white steed, she led the long dispirited warriors of France 
to victory or upheld her wondrous standard at the corona- 
tion of her King. Ofter she may be seen leaning over the 
crystal battlements, chin on hand and looking down with 
pensive gaze on France, and Orleans, and Domremy and 
Rouen whence her soul, like a white dove, ascended in the 
flame of her country's cruel ingratitude. 

But sometimes she turns her glance from scenes like these, 
charged with sweet and terrible memories, and looks down 
with loving intentness toward a certain spot on earth where 
an old white-haired man raises eyes of love and almost wor- 
ship to hers. They see and salute each other — oh, be sure of 
that ! The old man was many years younger when they first 
became acquainted, but the Maid is always the same age, for 
they grow no older in Heaven. Who shall explain the spell 
(since the Sieur de Conte will not confess his dreams), that 
has joined in a perfect love and understanding these two 
children of Nature, separated by the difference of race and 
the shoreless gulf of five hundred years ? Who can but won- 
der at the enchanting touch of a white hand from out the 
past which has turned the bold scoffer and jeerer, the wild 
man of the river and the mining camps, into such a knight 
as was rarely seen in the most gracious days of chivalry? 
And to see him now, when he should be taking the rest he 
has so gloriously earned, still eager to battle in her cause, 
daring the world to the onset, fighting for her with the pas- 



SAINT MARK 53 

sionate heart of youth, pleading for her with a burning zeal, 
as if in the five centuries that have rolled away since her 
death no other cause worthy to be named with hers has ap- 
pealed to the award of sword or pen — to see this rightly and 
with eyes cleared for the perception of that Truth which is 
the only thing really precious in the world, is to rejoice at the 
finest spectacle that has been given to the wondering eyes of 
men in our day. 

Whether the brave old knight will yet win the whole world 
over to her side, I can not say, though I think he will, if he be 
given time enough; but, at any rate, he has already made 
sure of all kind and feeling hearts. I believe his devotion to 
Joan of Arc is the finest and most ideal poem of our age — 
an age, to be sure, which has known too little poetry and 
which has never thought of looking to the Sieur de Conte 
to supply it. And I believe, further, that the Book of the 
Ideal contains the story of no love more pure and beautiful 
than this which unites the Old Man and the Maid. 




Oscar TOldc'e Htonement 




T HARDLY seems a decade since the disgrace, 
the trial and sentence of Oscar Wilde. His death 
followed so close upon his punishment as to give 
the deepest tragic value to the lesson of his fall. 
There was in truth nothing left him to do but 
die, after he had penned the most poignantly pathetic poem 
and the most strangely moving confession (which is yet a 
subtle vindication) that have been given to the world since 
the noon of Byron's fame. 

Until the present hour the world has withheld its pity from 
that tragedy, as complete in all its features as the Greek con- 
science would have exacted, — and Oscar Wilde has stood be- 
yond the pale of human sympathy. Only seemed to stand, 
however, for there are many signs of the reaction, the better 
judgment which never delays long behind the severest con- 
demnation of the public voice when, as in this case, the cir- 
cumstances justify an appeal to the higher mercy and human- 
ity. 

Socially, Oscar Wilde was executed, and for a brief time it 
seemed as if his name would stand only in the calendar of 
the infamous. But men presently remembered that he was a 
genius, a literary artist of almost unique distinction among 
English writers, a wit whose talent for paradox and deli- 
cately perverse fancy had yielded the world a pure treasure 
of delight. In the first hue and cry of his disgrace, the 
British public — and to a large extent, the American public 
also — had taken up moral cudgels not merely against the man 
himself, but against the writer, — a piece of ingratitude for 
which God will surely punish the stupid English. His plays 
were withdrawn from the theatres, his writings from the libra- 



OSCAR WILDE'S ATONEMENT 55 

ries and book stalls, and his name was anathema wherever 
British respectability wields its leaden mace. But though you 
can pass sentence of social death upon a man, you can not 
execute a Book! You can not lay your hangman's hands 
upon an Idea, and all the edicts of Philistinism are powerless 
against it. For true genius is the rarest and most precious 
thing in the world, and God has wisely ordained that the 
malice or stupidity of men shall not destroy it. And this the 
world sees to be just, when it has had time to weigh the mat- 
ter, as in the present instance. 

Oscar Wilde went to his prison with the burden of such 
shame and reprobation as has never been laid upon a literary 
man of equal eminence. Not a voice was raised for him — 
the starkness of his guilt silenced even his closest friends and 
warmest admirers. The world at large approved of his pun- 
ishment. That small portion of the world which is loth to 
see the suffering of any sinner, was revolted by the nature 
of his offense and turned away without a word; the sin of 
Oscar Wilde claimed no charity and permitted of no discus- 
sion. Had his crime been murder itself, his fame and genius 
would have raised up defenders on every hand. As it was, 
all mouths were stopped and the man went broken-hearted 
to his doom. 

But while his body lay in prison, the children of his mind 
pleaded for him, and such is the invincible appeal of genius, 
the heart of the world began to be troubled in despite of it- 
self. His books came slowly forth from their hiding-places; 
his name was restored here and there to a catalogue; 
a little emotion of pity was awakened in his favor. Then 
from his prison cell rose a cry of soul-anguish, of utter pathos, 
of supreme expiation, which stirred the heart of pity to its 
depths. The feigner was at last believed when the world 
had made sure of the accents of his agony and could put its 
finger in each of his wounds. Society had sentenced this 
poet: the poet both sentenced and forgave society, in the 



S6 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

"Ballad of Reading Gaol," thus achieving the most original 
paradox of his fantastic genius and throwing about his shame 
something of the halo of martyrdom. He did more than this, 
in the judgment of his fellow artists — he purchased his re- 
demption and snatched his name from the mire of infamy 
into which it had been cast. Strange how the world ap- 
plauded the triumphant genius which only a little while be- 
fore it had condemned to ignominy and silence ! 

The utter and incredible completeness of Wilde's disgrace 
satisfies the artistic sense, which is never content with half- 
results. We know that it afforded this kind of satisfaction 
to the victim himself, exigent of artistic effects even in his 
catastrophe — and the proof of it is "De Profundis." 

I may here remark that the virtuous publishers, both in 
England and America, who are quick to take their cue from 
the many-headed beast, are now making amends to the mem- 
ory of poor Wilde in their fashion ; that is, they are turning 
a pretty penny by the sale of his books, most of which cost 
them nothing. The rage of contumely is changed into a 
furore of admiration and a crescendo of regret. To some of 
us the pawing over of Wilde's literary remains by the vulgar 
mob and the present indecent enterprise of the publishers, 
are not less disgusting than the conduct of both parties in 
the hour of the man's calamity. 

"De Profundis" will take rank with the really memorable 
human documents. It is a true cry of the heart, a sincere 
utterance of the spiritual depths of this man's nature, when 
the angels of sorrow had troubled the pool. The only thing 
that seems to militate against its acceptance as such, is the 
unfailing presence of that consummate literary art, too con- 
scious of itself, which, as in all the author's work save the 
"Ballad of Reading Gaol," draws us constantly from the 
substance to the form. Many persons of critical acumen say 
they can not see the penitent for the artist. The texture of 
the sackcloth is too exquisitely wrought and is too mani- 



OSCAR WILDE'S ATONEMENT 57 

festly of the loom that gave us "Dorian Gray," "Salome," 
and the rest. How could a man stricken unto death with 
grief and shame so occupy himself with the vanity of style, — 
a dilettante even in the hourwhen fatewas crushing him with 
its heaviest blows? Does not this wonderful piece of work, 
lambent with all the rays of his lawless genius, show the arti- 
ficial core of the man as nothing that even he ever did before? 
And what is the spiritual value of a "confession" which is so 
obviously a literary tour de force; in which the plain and the 
simple are avoided with the anxious care of a prince of 
decadents ? 

So say, or seem to say, the critics. For myself, I can ac- 
cept as authentic Wilde's testament of sorrow, even though 
it be written in a style which often dazzles with beauty, sur- 
prises with paradox, and sometimes intoxicates with the rap- 
ture of the inevitable artist. He could not teach his hand to 
unlearn its cunning, strive as he might. Like Narcissus won- 
dering at his own beauty in the fountain, no sooner had he 
begun to tell the tale of his sorrow than the loveliness of his 
words seized upon him, and the sorrow that found such ex- 
pression seemed a thing almost to be desired. 

So when Oscar Wilde took up the pen in his prison solitude 
to make men weep, he did that indeed, but too soon he de- 
lighted them as of yore. Art, his adored mistress, whispered 
her thrilling consolations to the poor castaway — they had 
taken all from him, — liberty, honor, wealth, fame, mother, 
wife, children, and shut him up in an iron hell, but by God! 
they should not take her! With this little pen in hand they 
were all under his feet, — solemn judge, stolid jury, the beast 
of many heads and the whited British Philistia. Let them 
come on now! — but soft, the poet's anger is gone in a mo- 
ment, for beauty, faithful to one who had loved her t'other 
side o' madness, comes and fills his narrow cell with her ador- 
able presence, bringing the glory of the sweet world he has 
lost, — the breath of dawn, the scented hush of summer nights, 



58 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

the peace of April rains, the pageant of the autumn lands, 
the changeful wonder of the sea. Imagination brushes away 
his bounds of stone and steel to give him all her largess of 
the past; gracious figures of poesy and romance known and 
loved from his sinless youth (the man is always an artist, 
but you see ! he can weep) ; the elect company of classic ages 
to whom his soul does reverence and who seem not to scorn 
him ; the fair heroines of immortal story who in the old days, 
as his dreams so often told him, had deemed him worthy of 
their love — he would kneel at their white feet now, but their 
sweet glances carry no rebuke; the kind poets, his beloved 
masters in Apollo, who bend upon him no alienated gaze; 
the heroes, the sages who had inspired his boyish heart, the 
sceptred and mighty sons of genius who had roused in him 
a passion for fame — all come thronging at the summons of 
memory and fancy — a far dearer and better world than that 
which had denied, cursed and condemned him, and which he 
was to know no more. 

Then last of all, when these fair and noble guests were 
gone and the glow of their visitation had died out into the 
old bitter loneliness and sorrow, there came One whose smile 
had the brightness of the sun and the seven stars. And the 
poor prisoner of sin cast himself down at the feet of the 
Presence as unworthy to look upon that divine radiancy, and 
the fountains of his heart were broken up as never before. 
Yet in his weeping he heard a Voice which said, "Thy sin 
and sorrow are equal and thou hast still but a little way to 
go. Come!" 

Then rose up the sinner and fared forth of the spirit with 
Christ to Emmaus. 

And men will yet say that the words which the sinner 
wrote of that Vision have saved his soul (that soon thereafter 
was demanded of him) and sweetened his fame forever. But 
the critics who forget the adjuration, "Judge not lest ye be 



OSCAR WILDE'S ATONEMENT 



59 



judged," cry out that the sinner is never to be trusted in 
these matters, because he writes so well ! God, however, is 
kinder than men or critics. He will forgive the poor poet 
in spite of his beautiful style. 




Children of tbe flge. 




HAVE been reading the "Last Letters of Aubrey 
Beardsley." A strange book, full of a sort of 
macabre interest. Not really a book, and yet 
peculiarly suggestive as an end-of-the-century 
document. The soul of Beardsley here exposed 
with a kind of abnormal frankness that somehow recalls the 
very style of art by which he shocked and captured the 
world's regard. And the obvious purpose of it all, to show 
how he attained peace of the spirit and a quiet grave in his 
early manhood. 

Poor Beardsley was bitten deep with the malady of his age 
— he ranks with the most interesting, though not, of course, 
the greatest of its victims. He died under thirty and his 
name is known to thousands who know nothing of his art nor 
perhaps of any art whatever. To very many his name stands 
as a symbol of degeneracy. There is an intimate legend 
which attaints himwith the scarlet sins of the newer hedonism. 
He is closely associated in the public mind with the most trag- 
ically disgraced literary man of modern times. In art he 
was a lawless genius, but a genius for all that, else the world 
would not have heard so much of him. The fact that counts 
is, that in a very brief life he did much striking work and for 
a time at least gave his name to a school of imitators. 
Whether his artistic influence was for good or evil, does not 
matter in this view of him — let the professors haggle about 
that. What does matter is the fact and sum of his accom- 
plishment, which justifies the continued interest in his name. 
One naturally associates with Beardsley other ill-fated vic- 
tims of the age, such as Maupassant, Bastien Lepage, Marie 
Bashkirtseff, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, — to cite no more. 



CHILDREN OF THE AGE 6 1 

They were all martyrs of their own talent, and martyrs also 
of that ravaging malady of the heart, that devouring casuis- 
try, so peculiar to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 
We may be sure the disease was not confined to a few persons 
of extraordinary talent — of them we heard only because of 
their position in the public mind, and also because, as artists, 
they were bound to reveal their sufferings. Nay, we were 
the more keenly interested in their painful confessions, know- 
ing that they spoke for many condemned to bear their agon- 
ies in silence. For the world will soon turn away from an 
isolated sufferer, as from a freak on the operating table — 
let it fear or recognize the disease for its own and it will 
never weary of seeing and hearing. This commonplace truth 
explains, I think, the great and continuing interest which the 
persons above named have excited. 

All of these were unusually gifted, whether as artists or 
writers, and all strove to fulfill their talents with a suicidal 
fury of application. It seemed as if each had a prescience 
of early death and labored with fatal devotion that the 
world might not lose the fruit which was his to give. Gen- 
erous sacrifice, which never fails to mark the rarest type of 
genius. Maupassant, perhaps the most gifted, the most terri- 
bly in earnest of all, went to work like a demoniac, pouring 
forth a whole literature of plays, poems, stories, romances, all 
in the space of ten years. Such fecundity, coupled with an 
artistic practice so admirable and a literary conscience so 
exacting, was never before witnessed in the same writer. But 
the world presently learned a greater wonder still — that this 
unwearied artist had in those ten years of apparently unre- 
mitting labor, lived a life that was not less full of romance, 
of passion, of variety and excitement than the creations of his 
brain. He had accomplished a two-fold suicide — in life and 
in art. 

Maupassant died mad, his brain worn out by constant pro- 
duction, his heart torn by the malady of his age, which we 



62 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

can trace in so many pages of his work. But at least he 
died without disgrace, and in this respect his fate was far 
happier than that of Oscar Wilde, his contemporary and 
equal in genius, whose brilliant career closed in the darkest in- 
famy. Poor Wilde sinned greatly no doubt, — the English 
courts settled that, — though his atonement was of a piece 
with his offending. The man dies but the artist lives; and 
Wilde has work to his credit which will surely survive the 
memory of his tragic shame. 

In his last wretched days Wilde turned for consolation to 
the Catholic Church, which, with a deeper knowledge of 
human nature than her rivals can understand, still makes the 
worst sinner, if repentant, her peculiar care. Wilde became 
a Catholic and he recorded that had he but done so years 
before, the world would not have been shocked by the story 
of his disgrace. This is less a truism than a confession. At 
any rate, one is not sorry to know that the poor, broken- 
hearted wretch found sanctuary at the last and died peace- 
fully in that divine hope which he has voiced in the noblest 
of his poems. 

Like Wilde, Beardsley became a Catholic at the last when 
he was under sentence of death from consumption, and the 
"Letters" are addressed to a worthy Catholic priest who 
instructed him in the faith. Beardsley was not in any sense 
a writer, and these letters were obviously written in perfect 
candor and with no thought of their ever meeting any eyes 
save the good priest's for which they were intended. All the 
same they are, as I have already said, curiously interesting, 
and they do not lack touches of genuine insight and emotion. 
The fantastic artist grew very sober in the shadow of death, 
and the riot of sensuality in which his genius had formerly 
delighted, was clean wiped from his brain. Wilde himself, 
in his last days of grace, might have penned this sentence : 

"If Heine is the great warning, Pascal is the great example 
to all artists and thinkers. He understood that to become a 



CHILDREN OF THE AGE 63 

Christian the man of letters must sacrifice his gifts, just as 
Magdalen sacrificed her beauty." 

Strange language, this, from an end-of-the-century deca- 
dent, whose achievement in art was that he had carried 
one step farther the suggestions of the wildest sensualism. 
But perhaps it was not the same Beardsley who made the 
pictures to "Salome" and who, through the most original, 
creative part of his career, worked like a man in the frenzy 
of satyriasis. No, it was not the same Beardsley — the sentence 
of premature death had turned Pan into a St. Anthony. 

Not long after penning the words I have quoted, Beards- 
ley made a sacrifice of his gifts and was received into the 
Catholic Church. Within a year thereafter he died. There 
is nothing to mar the moral of his conversion and edifying 
change of heart, except the reflection that, like so many other 
eleventh-hour penitents, he put off making a sacrifice of his 
gifts until he had no further use for them. And at the last, 
one can't help thinking that if Beardsley had not made some 
fearfully immoral pictures, this book, with the highly moral 
story of his conversion, would not have been put before the 
world. 

I have mentioned Ernest Dowson, a minor poet, the singer 
of a few exquisite songs. Less talented than the others, yet a 
true child of the age and stricken at the heart with the same 
malady, Dowson owes his fame more to the memorial written 
by his friend and brother poet, Arthur Symons, than to his 
own work, which in bulk is of the slightest. His short life 
was frightfully dissolute — Symons speaks of his drunken- 
ness with a kind of awe. It was not an occasional over-indul- 
gence with comrades of his own stamp, passing the bottle 
too often when their heads grew hot and their tongues loos- 
ened; it was not the solitary, sodden boozing to which many 
hopeless drunkards are addicted. For weeks at a stretch 
Dowson would give himself up to a debauch with the refuse 
of the London slums, and during that time he would seem 



64 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

an utterly different being, with scarcely a hint of his normal 
self. I wish some one would explain how this brutal sottish- 
ness can co-exist with the most delicate intellectual sensibility, 
with the poet-soul. We have had many explanations of the 
puzzle, and they have only one fault — they do not explain. 

Dowson left us little, not because he drank much, but 
because he could rarely satisfy his own taste, which kept him 
as unhappy in a literary sense as his conscience did in a 
religious one. He wrote some fine sonnets to a young woman 
whose mother kept a cheap eating-house : — she married the 
waiter. The genius of Beardsley could alone have done jus- 
tice to this grotesque romance. 

Like Beardsley, Dowson died a Catholic — he had barely 
passed thirty — but unlike Beardsley, he had expected to do so 
all his life, for he was born in the faith. Yet the faith had 
not saved him from le trial du siecle, nor had it kept him 
from the foul pit of debauchery. What it did — and this was 
much — was to give him a hope at the end. 

Oh, sad children of the age, why wait so long before com- 
ing to your Mother, the ancient Church? She alone can heal 
your cruel wounds, self-inflicted, and bind up your bleeding 
hearts; she alone can succor you; she alone can give your 
troubled spirit rest and quiet those restless brains that would 
be asking, asking unto madness. See ! — she has balsam and 
wine for vour wayfaring in this world and something that 
will fortify you for a longer journey. Hear ye the bells call- 
ing the happy faithful who have never known the hell of 
doubt; hear ye the organ pealing forth its jubilation over the 
Eternal Sacrifice ! Come into the great House of God, found- 
ed in the faith, strong with the strength, sanctified by the 
prayer and warm with the hope of two thousand years. Come, 
make here at the altar a sacrifice of your poor human gifts 
and exchange them for undying treasures. Painter, for your 
bits of canvas, the glories of heaven; poet, for your best 



CHILDREN OF THE AGE 



65 



rhyme the songs of the saved. Come, though it be not until 
the last hour — yet come, come, even then ! 

Whether the old Church can really give what she promises, 
I know not, but sure am I that men will go on believing to the 
end. For faith is ever more attractive than unfaith, and 
human nature craves a comfortable heaven; and, after all, it 
takes more courage to die in the new scientific theory of things 
than in the simple belief of the saints. And alas! the cold 
affirmations of science can not cure nor genius itself satisfy 
the stricken children of the age. 




Che Black friar. 




Beware ! beware ! of the Black Friar 

Who sitteth by Norman stone, 
For he mutters his prayer in the midnight air, 

And his mass of the days that are gone. 

And whether for good or whether for ill 

It is not mine to say, 
But still to the house of Amundeville 

He abideth night and day. 

Don Juan. 

NE may wonder what my Lord Byron in the 
shades thinks of his noble grandson's perform- 
ance in summoning the obscene Furies to a final 
desecration of his grave. Surely the ghouls of 
scandal that find their congenial food in the 
shrouds of the illustrious dead, have never had richer quarry. 
True, they have already had their noses at the scent (through 
the sweet offices of an American authoress), and have even 
picked a little at the carrion; but the full body-of-death was 
never before delivered to them. 

This point has been clouded over in the public discussion of 
the infamy. It should be made clear in order that the Earl of 
Lovelace may receive his due credit. Mrs. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe's revelations were, of course, to the same purport, 
but they were based on the unsupported word of Lady Byron 
and some very free readings of certain passages in the poet's 
works. Everybody was shocked, nobody convinced. Mrs. 
Stowe's book was damned by universal consent and with- 
drawn from public sale. 



THE BLACK FRIAR 67 

Lord Lovelace has about the same story to tell, and his 
revival of the horrid scandal would go for nought, were it 
not that he is himself a kind of witness against the dead. It 
would be foolish to deny that many people will as such accept 
him. There is nobody now living to share or dispute his 
preeminence in shame. Lord Lovelace should have a por- 
tion, at least, of the burden of Orestes. 

Yes, there are terrible things in this darkly perplexed 
drama of the house of Byron, which make it seem like a mod- 
ern version of the old Greek tragedy. Look at the figures in 
it. A great poet — among the very greatest of his race 
— beautiful as a god, born to the highest place, the spoiled 
darling of nature and of fortune, dazzling the world with 
his gifts, drunk himself with excess of power, crowding such 
emotion and enthusiasm, such vitality and passion, such 
adventure and achievement, such a fulness of productive 
power within the short span of a life cut off in its prime, as 
have never marked the career of another human being. 
Never have men's eyes wonderingly followed so splendid and 
lawless a comet in the sky of fame. Never was man loved 
more passionately, hated more bitterly, admired more extrav- 
agantly, praised more wildly, damned more deeply. His 
quarrel divided the world into armed camps which still main- 
tain their hostile lines. He was the Napoleon of the intel- 
lectual world and bulked as large as the Corsican, with whom 
indeed he shared the conquest of Europe. And by Europe 
he was acclaimed and almost deified when England had first 
exiled and later denied him a place in the pantheon of her 
great. 

Never, too, were great faults redeemed by grander vir- 
tues, worthy of his towering genius — virtues to which the 
eyes of those who loved him still turned with shining hope 
after each brief eclipse of his nobler self, as when the sudden 
summer storm has passed over, men seek the sun. Virtues 

\ 



68 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

which drew the hatred of his race and caste and have left his 
name as a sword and a burning brand in the world. 

Such is the chief actor in this terrible and sinister drama 
which has lately been unveiled by the perfidy of the heir of his 
blood — the son of that "Ada" whom his verse has immortal- 
ized. The remaining characters are few, which is also fatally 
in accordance with the rules of Greek tragedy. For the 
most tremendous dramas of the flesh and the spirit do not 
ask a crowd of performers ; two or three persons will suffice 
and the eternal elements of love and hate. 

So here we have, besides the poet, only the unloved and 
unloving wife, who meekly discharged her bosom of its long- 
festering rancor ere she left the world ; the beloved — perhaps 
too wildly beloved — half-sister of the poet, whose memory 
(in spite of the hideous calumny laid upon her) is like a 
springing fountain of bright water in the hot desert of his 
life; and, lastly, the evil grandson in whom the ancestral 
curses of the house of Byron have found a terribly fit medium 
of execution and vengeance. It seems a circumstance of 
added horror that this parricidal slanderer should be a hoary 
old man, while the world can not imagine Byron save as he 
died, in the glory and beauty of youth. 

What madness possessed the man? Was it perhaps the 
hoarded rage and bitterness of many years, that he should 
have been compelled to live his long life without fame or 
notice, in the shadow of a mighty name? A wild enough 
theory, but such extraordinary madness as my Lord Love- 
lace's will not allow of sane conjecture. One does not pick 
and choose his hypotheses in Bedlam. 

That my Lord Lovelace is mad doth sufficiently, indeed 
overwhelmingly, appear from his part in this shameful and 
damnable business; but as often happens in cases of reasoning 
dementia, the truth comes out rather in some petty detail 
than in the general conduct. Thus, at the outset, he orders 
his charges very well and maintains a semblance of dignity 



THE BLACK FRIAR 69 

that would befit a worthier matter. One is, passingly, almost 
tempted to believe that the noble lord has been moved to 
the shocking enterprise by a compelling sense of moral and 
even filial obligation. He seems to speak more in sorrow 
than in anger and comes near to winning our sympathy, if not 
our approval. This at the threshold of his plea. But his 
malignity soon -reveals itself, horrifying and disgusting us, 
and suddenly the detail crops up — the little thing for which 
intelligent alienists are always on the alert — and losing all 
control, he abandons himself to the utter freedom of his 
hatred and his madness. I refer now to the atrocious passage 
in his book in which he exults over the alleged fact revealed 
by the post-mortem examination of Byron's remains — that 
the poet's heart was found to be partly petrified or turned 
into stone! 

A pretty bauble this to play with ! There are saner men 
than my Lord Lovelace trying to seize the moon through 
their grated windows, and coming very near to doing it — 
oh, very near ! 

But I should like to have a look at my Lord Lovelace's 
heart! 

Lovers of Byron's fame may be glad, at least, that the 
worst has now been said and calumny can not touch the great 
poet further. Ever since his death more than eighty years ago, 
the hyenas of scandal have wrangled over his grave, shock- 
ing the world in their hunt for uncleanness. All the name- 
less things that delight to see greatness brought low, genius 
disgraced, the sanctuary of honor defiled and the virtue of 
humanity trampled in the dirt, were bidden to the feast. 
Those obscene orgies have lasted a long time : they are now 
at an end. The unclean have taken away the uncleanness, if 
such there was, and are dispersed with their foul kindred 
in the wilderness. The clean remains and all that was truly 
vital and imperishable of Byron — the legacy of his genius, 



7o 



PALMS OF PAPYRUS 



the inspiration of his example in the cause of liberty, the 
deathless testimony of his spirit for that supreme cause, and 
his flame-hearted protest against the enthroned Sham, Mean- 
ness and Oppression which still rule the world. These 
precious bequests of Byron we have immortal and secure. As 
for the rest — 

Glory without end 

Scattered the clouds away, and on that name attend 

The tears and praises of all time! 




Lafcadio ftcarn. 




AS the Silence fallen upon thee, O Lafcadio, in 
that far Eastern land of strange flowers, strange 
gods and myths, where thou, grown weary of a 
world whence the spirit of romance had flown, 
didst fix thy later home? Art thou indeed gone 
forever from us, who loved thee, being of thy brave faith in 
the divinity of the human spirit, and art thou gathered to a 
strange Valhalla of thy wiser choice, — naturalized now, as 
we may of a truth believe, among the elect and heroic shades 
of old Japan? Is that voice stilled which had not its peer 
in these last lamentable days, sounding the gamut of beauty 
and joy that had almost ceased to thrill the souls of men? 
Child of Hellas and Erin, are those half-veiled eyes, that yet 
saw so deeply into the spiritual Mystery that enfolds our sen- 
suous life, forever closed to this earthly scene? Hath Beauty 
lost her chief witness and the Lyre of Prose her anointed 
bard and sacerdos? Shall we no more hearken to the 
cadences of that perfect speech which was thy birthright, 
sprung as thou wert from the poesy of two immemorial lands, 
sacred to eloquence and song? 

Ill shall we bear thy loss, O Lafcadio, given over as we 
are to the rule and worship of leaden gods. Thou wert for 
us a witness against the iron Law that crushed, and ever 
crushes, our lives; against the man-made superstition which 
impudently seeks to limit the Ideal. From beyond the violet 
seas, in thy flower-crowned retreat, thou didst raise the joyous 
paean of the Enfranchised. Plunged deep into mystic lore 
hidden from us, exploring a whole realm of myths and wor- 
ships of which our vain science knows nothing, thou wouldst 
smile with gentle scorn at the monstrous treadmill of creeds 



72 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

and cultures — gods and words — where we are forever 
doomed to toil without fruit or respite. 

We hearkened to thy wondrous tales of a land whose 
babes have more of the spirit of Art than the teachers of our 
own ; where love is free yet honored and decency does not 
consist in doing that privately which publicly no man dare 
avow ; where religion, in our brutal sense, does not exist ; and 
where crime, again in our brutal sense, is all but unknown. 
We heard thee tell, with evermore wonder, how this people 
of Japan has gone on for hundreds, nay, thousands of years, 
producing the humblest as well as the highest virtues without 
the aid of an officious religion ; how these Japanese folk have 
the wisdom of age and the simplicity of childhood, being 
simple and happy, loving peace, contented with little, respect- 
ful tov/ard the old, tender toward the young, merciful toward 
women, submissive under just authority, and loving their 
beautiful country with a fervor of patriotism which we may 
not conceive. 

All this and more thou didst teach us, Lafcadio, in the way 
of thy gracious art, with many an exquisite fancy caught from 
the legendary love of ancient Nippon and with the ripe ful- 
ness of thy strangely blended genius. So we listened as to a 
far-brought strain of music, and were glad to hear, hailing 
thee Master — a title thou hadst proudly earned. Yet even 
as we sat at thy feet drinking in the tones of thy voice, there 
came One who touched thee quickly on the lips — and we 
knew the rest was Silence. 

Peace to thee, Lafcadio, child of Erin and Hellas, adopted 
son and poet of Nippon. Thy immortality is a ceaseless day- 
spring; for thou sleepest in the Land of the Sunrise . 
and Nippon, who has never learned to forget, watches over 
thy fame. 



Lafcadio Hearn was a poet working in prose, as all true 
poets now inevitably are, a literary artist of original motive 



LAFCADIO HEARN 73 

and distinction among the rabble of contemporary scribblers. 
For these two things a man is not easily forgiven or forgotten 
when he has passed the Styx. 

Half Irish, half Greek, the flower of this man's genius 
took unwonted hue and fragrance from his strangely blended 
paternity; the hybrid acquired a beauty new and surprising in 
a world that looks only for the stereotype. Despairing of the 
tame effects produced by regularity, Nature herself seems to 
have set an example of lawlessness. 

Lafcadio Hearn took care to avoid the conventional in the 
ordering of his life as sedulously as in the products of his 
brain. For this, the man being now dead and silent, the con- 
ventional takes a familiar revenge upon his memory. 

The conventional — lest we forget — is the consensus of 
smug souls, the taboo uttered by mediocrity, the Latin in- 
vidia whereat Flaccus flickered, with all his assurance. It has 
much the same voice in every age. 

So we are hearing that one of the very few men who both 
made and honored literature in our time was, in his daily life 
and his principles of conduct, a moral monstrosity ; a sort of 
intellectual Caliban, delighting in the abnormal and the per- 
verse, especially in the sexually abnormal and the racially per- 
verse. Through the frankness of certain persons, mostly 
journalists who refrained from speaking while Hearn might 
have contradicted them, we learn that while in this country he 
made a cult of miscegenation, as it presents itself at New 
Orleans and other places in the South, consorted with ne- 
gresses of the lowest type, and devoted himself to the unclean 
mysteries of voodooism. 

These facts are cheerfully, even emulously, borne witness 
to by journalists who worked with Hearn and who shared his 
friendship and confidence. That they should make copy of 
their acquaintance (alleged )with the dead man is not, per- 
haps, of itself a censurable thing. That they may have black- 
ened him in their report is not, unluckily, without precedent 



74 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

in the ways of journalism. There is, to be sure, a fine sense 
of honor among journalists and an utter freedom from the 
basest of all vices, envy — but that is not the present subject. 

We learn from the same source that Hearn's final mar- 
riage with a Japanese woman was strictly in keeping with the 
innate perversity which moved him to loathe and shun his 
own race. (She bore him children who survive their father, 
but not the less nobly did we refuse to spare their feelings.) 
Descriptions of Hearn's physical appearance to suit the pic- 
ture of moral depravity above outlined, are frankly and min- 
utely supplied. God forgive them! — the libel is such as to 
burn the heart of every man who loves and honors true 
genius. 

How such a monster could have produced the miracles of 
thought and style and fancy which are everywhere scattered 
like seed pearl in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, your can- 
did journalists do not attempt to explain — the thing is beyond 
their quality. But the other thing — the legend of the man's 
debasement — they know devilish well, and they tell of it 
right pertly, so that faith is easily induced in the story. And 
the wings of the press carry the foul tale to many a quarter 
where no word of contradiction will ever find its way. For 
this is the justice of journalism. 

Notwithstanding, one plain fact, avouched by all human 
experience, may reassure the wide-scattered fraternity of 
those who prize the work and cherish the memory of Laf- 
cadio Hearn. It is this : — No man ever succeeded in writing 
himself down better or worse than he really was. You may 
write, but the condition is that you make a faithful likeness 
of yourself — nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice. 

The true Lafcadio Hearn, the shy, pitiably myopic genius 
nursed on tears, the dreamer of strange dreams, the prose 
poet of a new dower of fancy, the weaver of hitherto un- 
wrought cadences for the inner ear, the latest brave worship- 



LAFCADIO HEARN 



75 



er of truth and beauty, — where shall we look for him but in 
his enduring work? — soul and man to the essential life ! 

As for the horrid changeling of the journalists, it is 
already, — with the consent of all kind hearts, — rejected and 
ground up with the refuse of yesterday's editions. 




H fellow to the Rev. Dr. fiyde. 




N literature the fable of the living ass and the 
dead lion is constantly repeating itself. I have 
just chanced upon an instance in which the ass 
displays more than his usual temerity. 

A person all unknown to fame, one Rev. 
Frederic Rowland Marvin, makes a tuppenny bid for notice 
by impeaching the integrity of Robert Louis Stevenson's 
motives in writing the celebrated Letter on Father Damien. 

Needless to recall, the Letter was addressed to the Rev. 
Dr. Hyde, of Honolulu, who had cast some very gross and 
unmerited aspersions upon the martyr priest. 

Damien, as all the world knows, was a Belgian missionary 
priest who had devoted himself to the service of the lepers at 
Molokai, and, at the height of his vigorous ministry, con- 
tracting the disease, died among them. The question of his 
saintship cannot be taken up by the Church until a hundred 
years after his death. Meantime many people of different 
religions, and some of none at all, regard Damien as the only 
authentic saint of modern times. Robert Louis Stevenson 
was unquestionably of this opinion. 

The Rev. Dr. Hyde, of Honolulu, in a letter to a brother 
parson (the Rev. H. B. Gage) made the hideous charge that 
Damien had become infected with leprosy through sexual 
intercourse with the women lepers of Molokai ; characterized 
him as "a coarse, dirty man, headstrong and bigoted," and 
sneered at the chorus of praise which his heroic death had 
evoked. All of which was extensively circulated by religious 
papers of the Hyde denomination. 

This precious testimony came under the eye of Robert 
Louis Stevenson, who had himself visited the leper colony 



A FELLOW TO THE REV. DR. HYDE 77 

when Damien was "in his resting grave," and had collected 
the whole truth 1 regarding him from the witnesses of his life 
and death. By an useful coincidence, the author had likewise 
seen the reverend slanderer Hyde and held converse with 
him at his "fine house in Beretania street" (Honolulu). 

The posthumous attack upon Damien by a rival but 
recreant missioner, breathing a sectarian malignity rare in our 
time, touched that fiery intrepid soul to an utterance which 
ranks with the highest proofs of his genius and the best fruits 
of the liberal spirit. His Letter on Father Damien is, in truth, 
the quintessence of Stevenson, the choice extract of his pas- 
sion and power, his deep-hearted hatred of injustice, his 
princelike contempt of meanness, his loathing scorn of re- 
ligious bigotry, his tenderness, delicacy and chivalry, — all 
conveyed in a flawless triumph of literary art. Not vainly 
did he boast: 

"If I have at all learned the trade of using words to con- 
vey truth and to arouse emotion, you have at last furnished 
me with a subject." And again : "I conceive you as a man 
quite beyond and below the reticences of civility; with what 
measure you mete, with that it shall be measured to you 
again; with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the 
foil and to plunge home." 

I can never read the Letter to Hyde without seeing a flame 
run between the lines; I never lay it down that I do not 
at once bless and damn the Rev. Dr. Hyde. But not being 
myself parson-led, I wish the gentleman no worse damnation 
than is assured to him in Tusitala's honest tribute. 

Well, this is the piece of work which Dr. Marvin — he is, 
it appears, a parson like the eternally disgraced Hyde — seeks 
to disparage by attainting the integrity of the knightliest fig- 
ure of modern letters. Let us see how this bold parson 
achieves the asinine exploit of kicking the dead lion and be- 
traying his folly to the world. 

After stating the extraordinary assumption that Steven- 



78 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

son's Letter on Father Damien "was never regarded as any- 
thing more than a striking exhibition of literary pyrotechny," 
Dr. Marvin proceeds to judgment as follows : 

"Stevenson's letter was, I am fully persuaded, more the 
work of the rhetorician than of the man. He was carried 
away by the opportunity of making a rhetorical flourish and 
impression, and so went further than his own judgment ap- 
proved. Stevenson was a man of many noble qualities, and 
conscience was not wanting as an element of power in his 
life, but his letter to Dr. Hyde was not honest, nor had it for 
any length of time the approval of his own inner sense of 
right and justice. He did not really believe what he wrote, 
neither did he intend to write what he did. The temptation 
from a literary point of view was great, and the writer got 
the better of the man." 

Here the parson speaks in no uncertain tone — a mere lit- 
erary man would not so frame his indictment. But what a 
gorgeous piece of impudence ! 

I would not take the Rev. Marvin too seriously, but lest 
any person with the wit of three asses should be deceived by 
his shallow effrontery, I am bound to notice it. And since the 
Rev. Marvin has of his own free will made himself yoke- 
fellow with the infamous Hyde, it is but just that he be 
clothed with the full dignity of his election. 

To discuss the foolish question which he has raised con- 
cerning Stevenson's honesty of motive in writing the Letter 
to Dr. Hyde, would shame any man — not a parson — of com- 
mon sense. Nor is it needful in any case, the Rev. Marvin 
sufficiently putting himself out of terms in these words: "The 
temptation from a literary point of view was great, and the 
writer got the better of the man." 

Now the lovers of Stevenson have no need to be reminded 
that such was his passionate care to avoid the slightest doubt 
of his sincerity in writing as he did upon Damien and to repel 
the stock literary imputation here uttered by a worthy cham- 



A FELLOW TO THE REV. DR. HYDE 79 

pion of Hyde, that the Letter was printed originally for pri- 
vate distribution only, the public demand for it soon becoming 
irresistible; and that Stevenson always refused to touch a 
penny from the publication. In 1890 he wrote to a London 
publisher who wished to bring out an edition : — "The Letter 
to Dr. Hyde is yours or any man's. I will never touch a 
penny of remuneration. I do not stick at murder: I draw 
the line at cannibalism. I could not eat a penny roll that piece 
of bludgeoning had gained for me." 

"If the world at all remember you" (said the Letter to 
Hyde) "on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be 
named saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter to 
the Reverend H. B. Gage." 

Was ever such a sight vouchsafed to gods or men as this 
of the Rev. Dr. Marvin struggling belatedly to win for him- 
self a small title in that infamous remembrance — to snatch 
a rag from the garment of shame which the great artist 
fitted upon Dr. Hyde in his character of Devil's Advocate 
againut Damien? 

The defense of Damien remains one of the cherished doc- 
uments of the free spirit. I thank Dr. Marvin for having 
given me an occasion of re-reading it, and I cheerfully ac- 
cord him the grace of having moved me to perform this 
religious duty twice instead of (my usual practice) once in 
the year. I can but wonder what manner of man is he that it 
should have done him so little good ; yet I know I shall love 
it the more that its truth is thus again proven by the futile 
attacks of a spiritual fellow to Hyde. 

Yes, I re-read — as, please God, often I shall re-read — that 
true story of Damien's martyrdom, bare and tragic as Molo- 
kai itself, traced by the hand of one who had no sympathy of 
religious faith with him but only the common kinship of 
humanity — "that noble brother of mine and of all frail clay." 
I read again, with quickened pulse, of the lowly peasant 
priest, who, in obedience to the Master's call, "shut to with 



80 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

his own hand the doors of his own sepulchre!" I saw once 
more that woeful picture of the lepers' island, surrounded by 
a great waste of sea, which to those condemned wretches 
spells the black despair of infinity : — in its midst the hill with 
the dead crater, the hopeless front of precipice, the desolation 
there prepared by nature for death too hideous for men to 
look upon. Again I made that melancholy voyage to Molo- 
kai and wept with Tusitala as he sat in the boat with the two 
sisters, "bidding farewell, in humble imitation of Damien, to 
the lights and joys of human life." I shuddered to mark the 
fearful deformations of humanity that awaited us on the 
shore — the population of a nightmare — every other face a 
blot on the landscape. I saw that the place was an unspeak- 
able hell even with the hospital and other improvements, 
lacking when Damien came there and "slept that first night 
under a tree amidst his rotting brethren." I visited the 
Bishop-Home, whose every cup and towel had been washed 
by the hand of "dirty Damien." I saw everywhere the tokens 
of his passage who "by one striking act of martyrdom had 
directed all men's eyes on that distressful country — who at a 
blow and the price of his life had made the place illustrious 
and public." I thought upon that great and simple renuncia- 
tion, daunting the mind with its sheer sacrifice which, better 
far than all the loud-tongued creeds, brought the living Christ 
within sight and touch and understanding. And these won- 
derful lines of Browning came into my mind with a sudden 
vividly realized meaning and pathos: — 

Remember what a martyr said 

On the rude tablet overhead : 

"I was born sickly, poor and mean, 

"A slave — no misery could screen 

"The holders of the pearl of price 

"From Caesar's envy; therefore twice 

"I fought with beasts, three times I saw 



A FELLOW TO THE REV. DR. HYDE 81 



"My children suffer by his law; 
"At last my own release was earned ; 
"I was some time in being burned, 
"But at the close a Hand came through 
"The fire above my head, and drew 
"My soul to Christ, whom now I see. 
"Ser gius, a brother, writes for me 
"This testimony on the wall — 
"For me, I have forgot it all." 




JMr. 6uppy. 

HERE was once, according to Mr. Dickens, a 
young man named Guppy, of 'umble circum- 
stances, who* became wildly smitten with Igh 
Life, as reflected in the newspapers. He read 
the Court Circular assiduously, he cut out and 
framed the portraits of Social Celebrities; he lived in fancy 
amid the splendid scenes of his desire. Mr. Guppy special- 
ized on the Haristocracy, the most sacred institution of his 
country; the names of dukes, lords, duchesses, countesses, 
came trippingly to his tongue. The poor young man fancied 
himself in familiar habits with all those grand people, and 
this harmless delusion occasionally made him suffer, as when 
once he reproached himself with having entered into a liaison 
with a countess (Her name, sir! — never would the lips of 
Guppy reveal it). In the main, however, Mr. Guppy was 
happy in his illusions, as the mildly mad usually are. He 
knew that he could never put his ambitions to the proof, 
owing to the sacredly exclusive character of Igh Society; and 
so he was spared trials which might have soured his sweetly 
hopeful spirit. 

I shall not deny that Mr. Guppy was a snob — he would 
have gloried in the title as identifying him, by implication, 
with the great; but I submit he was one over whom Charity 
may well drop a tear. Nay, if the word snob covered only 
such virtues and failings as those of the lamented Guppy, it 
might well be worn as a decoration of honor. 

In the pages of Dickens Mr. Guppy seldom wins more 
than a careless smile— the gloom of the surrounding tragedy 
crocks off, so to speak, upon the joyousness of Guppy. Yet 



MR. GUPPY 83 

the Master has given us nothing that better denotes his hand; 
Mr. Guppy certifies the genius of his creator in little. 

If you think this far-fetched, look at the figure Mr. 
Guppy makes in the world to-day. See him editing the "so^ 
ciety pages" of the great New York newspapers. See his 
honest efforts to foster the spirit of caste in this country — 
honest because he is himself shut out from the heaven which 
he depicts, and would sell his soul to get a card for his wife 
or daughter. See him sometimes, on another page, elo- 
quently denouncing the perils of a society of wealth, at the 
same time kissing and biting the hand of fortune. See him in 
the weeklies, those shining mirrors of public taste, which are 
entirely consecrate to the ideals of Mr. Guppy and fairly 
reek of him in editorial, picture and story. See him exalted 
to the Nth splendor in Philadelphia, where they name him 
Bok. See him in the magazines, that world which from the 
heaven above to the earth underneath declares the greatness 
of Guppy. See there in all its perfect flower the rank Ameri- 
can quintessence of Guppy — the subtle flattery of picture, the 
fawning, lick-spittle worship of the text, the hundred sur- 
faces of the Social Lie, glossed and pumiced and polished for 
those who believe themselves to form a superior class, and as 
a lure for the eyes of envy and desire. 

Note the phraseology of the American Guppy — his easy 
air of superiority, quite like the inherited article, his jaunty 
attempt to connect and identify the aristocracy of the Old 
World with the aristocracy of the New ; his patter of names 
and titles and pedigrees; his calm ignoring of that negligible 
quantity, "the people;" his absolute conviction that the few 
hundreds or thousands for whom he speaks are alone worth 
considering and that all the millions only want to hear about 
them. Can it be that we are being led by Mr. Guppy, as a 
child would lead us? And unto what issues? . . . 

Mrs. Atherton, a woman of talent, has made a study of the 
inexhaustible Guppy. She naturalizes him in this country, 



84 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

gives him the soul of a would-be American snob, with the 
same kind of food upon which the original Guppy fed, and 
sets him to work. The results are what the critics call "har- 
rowing" — they are also good entertainment and good art; 
and the telling of the story involves an exquisite satire on the 
American social idea. One sees, too, that Mrs. Atherton is 
not herself free from the bitterness with which she engulfs 
her hero : the Marah of Guppy is over us all ! 

Mrs. Atherton's Guppy is first baited by the newspapers, 
and loses his soul in the description of social grandeurs writ- 
ten and printed by men who can not for their lives break into 
society. Then he falls heir to a little money and sets out to 
make a regular campaign at Newport. He is good-looking, 
dresses well, and his intelligence does not amount to a crime. 
Everything then seems to be in his favor, but — let me not 
spoil a story which Mrs. Atherton alone has the right 
to tell. Read it, and you will get a more acute sense of the 
great American comedy now enacting, a bit of which is here 
etched with delicious malice ; you will also agree with me as 
to the importance of Mr. Guppy. 

I find much, very much, of Mr. Guppy in the palaver of 
the literary press. He is at the same time an eulogist, with- 
out measure, and a depreciator, without justice, of American 
literary effort. Now he vaunts the vigor of our Western lit- 
erary spirit, free from the shackles of tradition, and now he 
prostrates himself before the wooden gods of the British 
Philistia. To-day he will rank Woodrow Wilson with Hal- 
lam or Lecky, and exalt Howells above Thackeray; to-mor- 
row he will confess that we have no historian or novelist 
worthy to be named with those of the second British rank. 
The editor of a leading American review can see no hope for 
American literature, and deplores the badness of the books 
which his paper advertises by the broadside. This is called 
the literary conscience — it is really the hand of Mr. Guppy. 

The truth is, the curse of trying to seem the thing we are 



MR. GUPPY 85 

not — the essence of Guppy — is upon our literature and our 
sorry excuse for criticism as upon our social life. We are the 
most unreal people in the world, because we don't know what 
we are nor what God wants to make of us. Of course, I speak 
only of the infinitesimal, self-conscious minority — the great 
mass of our people are all right, but they are not the artistic 
concern of Mr. Guppy. The literature that pretends in this 
country is always aimed at the minority, and then, through 
the collusion of the Guppys of the press with the publishing 
trade, it is worked off upon the public. This happy result 
having been achieved, Mr. Guppy exclaims against the bad- 
ness and futility of the stuff which he has helped to foist on 
the literary market. 

Now and then, God knows how, a vigorous book with the 
red corpuscle, gets written and past the line which the care 
of Mr. Guppy has established. Instantly a hue and cry is 
raised that the book is without style or literary merit and 
that the success of such a work simply argues the low level 
of taste in this country. On such rare occasions Mr. Guppy 
is not ashamed to show us his tears — and he is never so terri- 
bly humorous as then. 

The other day a man died who had written a book which 
was and remains one of the greatest successes of our time. 
It has been read by thousands and thousands of people, both 
in this country and in Europe. It was a book that emphatic- 
ally made for good. To many it brought a sense of the 
divine beauty of the Christian legend which they would not 
otherwise have gained. It was to them and will be to thou- 
sands of others unborn, "tidings of great joy." At the very 
least, it planted in their lives a little shrub of grace and heal- 
ing which casts its perfume across the years. I am myself, if 
Mr. Guppy will allow me, indifferent literary ; I like a style 
as well as a story, and I believe that a good story always finds 
a style. Well, I have read a-many books in divers tongues 
and among the most precious pictures stored up therefrom 



86 



PALMS OF PAPYRUS 



in my memory, is the meeting of Ben-Hur with the young 
Son of Joseph, who gave him to drink. I was a boy when I 
read the book, and the boyish love I lavished upon it was, I 
am sure, worth far more than the critical apparatus I could 
now bring to the judging of it. I did not ask then if it was 
Art : I do not ask now. 

Oh, Mr. Guppy, if you could give me back those young 
feelings of joy, of pity and wonder, such as no book could 
now excite, I would almost pardon the cheap sneers which 
you and your kind fling upon that honored grave. 





H port of Hgc- 

EADER, when for you as for me the wild heyday 
of youth is past, and the heart of adventure 
all but pulseless, there is yet remaining to us a 
wonderful, untried, and, especially, untrodden, 
realm of romance. When churlish Time shall 
think to retire us from the heat and zest of life, classing us, 
too prematurely, as "old boys," there is still a trick, we may 
turn to his discomfiture. When the younkers club their fool- 
ish wits for a poor joke at our expense — what is so utterly 
inane to maturity as juvenile humor, green-cheese pleasan- 
try, pithless, fledgeling conceits? — we who are wise know 
that the best of the game is still for us; nor would we change 
with the reckless spendthrifts who mock us from the vanity 
of twenty year. 

It's ho for candles, a book and bed ! 

For candles, the modern equivalent, of course. I prefer a 
strong, well-shaded lamp to electric light or gas; the rocke- 
feller burns with a steady flame, does not sputter, or dwin- 
dle, or go out entirely, leaving you in a sulphuric darkness. 
But the wick should be trimmed by the hand of her who loves 
you best in the world ; by her, too, must the reading table be 
adjusted cosily at the head of the bed, so that the incidence of 
the gently burning flame may be just right — the more 
or less in these matters is of infinite significance; by her must 
the books and, above all, The Book, be disposed ready to the 
discriminating hand of the Sovereign Lector. 

Oh! — and, of course, the pipes or cigars. No smokeless 
person hath any rights in this kingdom ; he cometh falsely by 
his investiture; he is a Bezonian without choice; a marplot 
and spy — out with him ! . . . 



88 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

As to the time of going to bed, I would say eight o'clock, 
or half after eight; not earlier nor later, though the point need 
not be strained to a finical nicety. But one can not con- 
veniently go to bed amid the daylight business of the house, 
nor before supper, nor too soon after it. I knew a man who 
perversely insisted upon going to bed at five o'clock; he 
never rose to the dignity of a true bed-reader, and that which 
is, properly used, the most delightful of indulgences, became 
in the end, to this person, a formidable dissipation. Like a 
bad mariner, he was constantly out of his reckoning and at 
last came to grief: the fact that he was a non-smoker aided 
the catastrophe. 

But assuming that all the unities have been fulfilled, that 
the Book, the Reader and the Bed are in the most fortuitous- 
ly fortunate conjunction, will you tell me that the world has 
a sweeter pleasure to bestow, a more profoundly satisfying, 
yet not enervating, luxury of indulgence? 

Recall an instant that first delicious thrill of relaxed ease, 
of blissful security, of complete physical well-being — every 
nerve telegraphing its congratulations and your spinal column 
intoning a grand sweet song of peace ! You are now between 
the snowy sheets and the Elect Lady is looking tenderly to 
the pillows, etc., while you are tasting the most exquisite of 
sensations in the back of your calves. This is the veritable 
nunc dimittis moment of the experience; you are prepared, 
soothed and dulcified for what the Greeks called euthanasy; 
could that old classic idea of dissolution afford you a sweeter 
pang? . . . 

But, man, you're not dying like a rose in aromatic pain — 
you're simply going to bed to read. And here the Elect Lady, 
giving a final pat to the pillows, leans over, kisses you fondly 
and says, "AH right now, dear?" 

To which you reply (dissembling an internal satisfaction 
violent enough to alarm the police) — "All right now, dar- 
ling, thank you— but just push the cigars a bit nearer — there. 



A PORT OF AGE 89 

And be sure you tell Mary to keep the children quiet. And, 
of course, you won't forget to bring it up later — with a good 
bit of ice; so soothing after the mental excitement of a strong 
author. Thank you, dear." 

These details will often be varied — the unwedded reader 
is not, I think, steeped in such felicity, and of course there be 
instances where the married lector does not come at his desire 
so featly — but the outline remains the same. And the result 
arrives, as the French say: that is, my gentleman comes to 
book and bed. 

Then truly is he in that happy state described by the 
poet, — 

"The world forgetting, by the world forgot;" 
raised to the Nirvana of the mind ; close-wrapped in the eider- 
down security of his little kingdom that knoweth no treasons, 
stratagems or insurrections; in the world and yet not of it, as 
truly though in a different sense from the Apostolic one; 
tasting the pure pleasures of the intellect with a delicious 
feeling of mental detachment and at the same time a caressing 
consciousness of bodily ease; no other troubling imperium in 
his imperio — no thief in his candle — no fly in his ointment — 
nothing but the Book and his Absoluteship ! 

It is, Somatically considered, the only rational method of 
reading — the most universally abused of all the liberal arts. 
Are there not persons who make a foolish pretence of reading 
on railway trains, or in public restaurants, or in hotel lobbies, 
or even in theatres between the acts — nay, sometimes, by a 
piece of intolerable coxcombry, during the play itself? Whip 
me such barren pretenders ! — there is not a reader among 
them all. 

I am not sure that there is higher praise (for the intel- 
lectuals) than to be called a good reader, which is to say, a 
bed-reader. For the true reader (lector in sponda) is only 
less rare than the genuine writer; his genius no less a native 
and unacquired attribute; his setting apart from the common 



90 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

herd as clearly defined. To be a reader in this, the only 
true sense, is to belong to the Aristocracy of Intellect and to 
be assured of a philosophy which brings to age a crown of 
delight. 

No man should take up the noble habit of reading abed 
before the age of discretion, that is to say, the fortieth year. 
For at the eighth lustrum comes the dry light of reason, 
which is the true essential flame of the bed-reader, and, lack- 
ing which, he hath as little profit of his vocation as the owl at 
noonday. 

As to what he may read abed, we shall perhaps have some- 
thing to say another time. 

Some numbers back I wrote in these pages a brief essay 
on the pleasures of reading abed. Many appreciative letters 
called forth by this article seem to prove that the most de- 
lightful of intellectual pastimes is in no likelihood of falling 
into neglect. This, too, in spite of the fact that the habit of 
smoking at the same time — a necessary concomitant, as I have 
shown — makes of the indulgence a "fearful joy" and occa- 
sionally creates a little business for the insurance companies. 

But there is scarcely an act of our daily life that does not 
involve some risk or peril, and the stout bed-reader (and 
smoker) will not suffer himself to be daunted by a slight acci- 
dent or so, or even a hurry call from the fire department. 
Besides, in my former article, I pointed out some precaution- 
ary measures which elderly gentlemen (in particular) might 
take in order to combine the two delicious habits of reading 
and smoking abed with reasonable safety. I would not have 
them feel too safe, however, for as stolen pleasures are 
known to be sweetest, so in this matter the bed-reader's grati- 
fication is heightened and dulcified by a titillant sense of lurk- 
ing danger. Indeed, I make no doubt that a spark now and 
then dropping on the bedclothes, or in the folds of the read- 
er's nighty, or in his whiskers (should he haply be valanced) 



A PORT OF AGE 91 

and discovered before any great damage is done or profanity 
released, adds appreciably to the pleasure of the indulgence 
and is not a thing to be sedulously guarded against. How- 
ever, this is all a matter of taste, for we know, without refer- 
ence to theology, that some persons can stand more fire than 
others. 

This point being settled, I am asked to give a list of books 
or authors suitable to the requirements of the mature bed- 
reader (there are no others). I do not much relish the task, 
as I can not bear to have my own reading selected for me, and 
the priggish effrontery of those lettered persons who are con- 
stantly proposing lists of "best books" (in their estimation, 
forsooth!) moves my spleen not less than the purgatorial in- 
dustry of the Holy Office. But perhaps I may indirectly 
oblige my friends by glancing slightly at the preferences, — or 
mere crotchets, if you will, — of an irreclaimable bed-reader, 
who, being entirely quit of the vanities of careless youth, has 
now reached that mellowed philosophic age when he would 
rather lie snugly abed with a bright lamp at his pillow and a 
genial author to talk to him than do anything else in the 
world. Oh, by my faith ! 

In the first place, then, I would put books of a meditative, 
personal cast, such as have the privilege of addressing them- 
selves to the reader's intimate consciousness and of beguiling 
him into the illusion that their written thoughts and confes- 
sions are his very own. Of such favored books, beloved and 
cherished of the true bed-reader, are the great essayists or lay 
preachers, Montaigne, Bacon, Swift, Addison, Voltaire, 
Rousseau, Rochefoucauld, Macaulay, Lamb, Emerson, Car- 
lyle, Thackeray (in his Lectures and Roundabouts), Renan, 
Amiel — but I am resolved not to catalogue. These and such 
as these are emphatically thinking books, fit for the quiet 
commerce of the midnight pillow; trusted confessors of the 
soul, through whom it arrives the more perfectly to know 
itself; faithful pilots in the perplexed voyage of life; wise and 



92 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

loving friends whose fidelity is never suspect or shaken; 
solemn and tender counselors who give us their mighty hearts 
to read; august nuncios that deliver the messages of the high 
gods. 

I would bar all modern fiction, books of the hour — that 
swarm of summer flies — all trumpery love stories founded on 
the longings of puberty and green-sickness, all works on 
theology (except St. Augustine), political histories, cyclope- 
dias, scientific treatises, the whole accursed tribe of world's 
condensed or canned literatures and such like compilations, 
the books of Hall Caine, Marie Corelli and Andrew Car- 
negie, newspapers — that fell brood of time-devourers — and 
magazines — those pictured inanities. 

After this summary clearing of the field, the task of selec- 
tion should not be difficult; but even at this stage the prudent 
bed-reader can not afford to go it blind. 

I would not advise books of a violently humorous charac- 
ter more recent than Rabelais, Don Quixote or Gil Bias, even 
though I may here seem to utter treason against my beloved 
Mark Twain. But I must be honest with my readers — bed- 
readers, of course — and truth compels me to say that a re- 
cumbent position is not favorable to much exercise of the dia- 
phragm, which such reading calls for. I took Huck Finn to 
bed with me once when I lay down for a long illness, and 
hung to him in spite of the doctor and the nurse, until the 
happy meeting with Tom Sawyer, when I wandered off into a 
fantastic world where fictions and realities were one. The 
doctor afterward said I might have died laughing at any time, 
and now I sometimes think that it wouldn't have been such a 
bad thing — nay, I even believe that one couldn't be struck 
with a happier kind of death. 

However, I must insist that my friends shall sit up to Huck 
Finn, the Innocents and all that glorious family connection, as 
also to their co-sharers in a smiling immortality, Mr. Pick- 
wick and Sam Weller. Nor let me forget another genial fig- 



A PORT OF AGE 93 

ure who has taken a tribute of harmless mirth scarcely infe- 
rior to theirs from thousands of hearts and whom they 
would welcome to their benign fellowship — I strongly urge 
the reader who would have a care of his health, not to go to 
bed with Mr. Dooley. 

Next to the great essayists mentioned above, the poets 
offer the best reading for night and the bed — indeed I am not 
sure but that it is the only way to read certain poets. 

I an> equally fond of the prose and the poetry of Heine, 
and think he furnishes a variety of entertainment which, on 
several counts, is unmatched by any writer. But Heine gives 
no rest, and one is soon overborne by the charges of his wit 
and the unceasing attacks of his terrible raillery. 

In the most intimate sense Horace is (of course) without 
a rival as a companion and comforter of the nightly pillow. 
This charming Pagan has confessed and will always confess 
the best minds of the Christian world. I know one person 
who owes his dearest mental joys, his best nocturnal consola- 
tions and the very spring of hope itself to the little great man 
of Rome. But he must be read in the original — a condition 
which unfortunately disqualifies too many readers. The songs 
of Horace, being written in the immortal tongue of Rome, 
can never become antiquated. Though the Pontifex and the 
Virgin ceased hundreds of years agoi to climb the Capitolian 
hill, though the name of Anfidus is lost where its brawling 
current hurries down, still that treasure of genius endures, 
more lasting than brazen column, a joy and a refreshment 
ever to the jaded souls of men. 

Horace has the supreme and almost unique fortune to ap- 
pear always modern, his genius being of the finest quality 
ever known and happily preserved in an unchanging tongue. 
He is, for instance, far more modern than Dante and dis- 
tinctly nearer to us than the Elizabethans. Alone, he consti- 
tutes a sufficient reason for the admirable, though sometimes 
foolishly censured, practice of reading abed. 



94 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

I do not care to read the plays of Shakespeare betwixt the 
sheets — it seems a piece of coxcombry to coolly degust the 
accumulated horrors of Macbeth and Lear while lolling on 
your back and sybaritically exploring the softest places in 
your downy kingdom — truly a case of what's Hecuba to him 
or he to Hecuba ? But I find it quite different with the Poems, 
which (I may remark) are too frequently overlooked even by 
those who pride themselves on knowing their Shakespeare. 
Lately, through the kindness of Dr. Rolfe, I so re-read 
Shakespeare's Sonnets and for the first time arrived at some- 
thing like a true sense and appreciation of their deep organ 
melodies, and at least a partial understanding of the terrible 
lawless passion which inspired those lavish outpourings of 
guilty love and remorse that witness forever the glory and 
the shame of Shakespeare. 

No doubt, the learned Dr. Rolfe had to sit up to write his 
invaluable commentary, with a thorny desk at his breast; 
how much more fortunate I to digest it with unlabored impar- 
tiality, now and then calmly approving or, it may be, contro- 
verting the Doctor, but without heat; reclining at my ease, in 
a silence and abstraction so perfect that fancy could almost 
hear the living voices of the actors in this strange, repellant 
drama of the greatest of poets — stranger and more darkly 
perplexed than any which his genius gave to the stage — and 
the mind overleaped three full centuries to that memorable 
English 

"Spring 
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim 
Did put a spirit of youth in every thing 
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him !" 

Will Dr. Rolfe prepare more of these pleasant books? I 
profess myself only too desirous of going to bed to read 
them. . . . 

Letters of memorable men and women are among the 
pleasantest and most profitable reading for the bed. There is 



A PORT OF AGE 95 

so great a plenty of such books that I need not be at pains to 
specify. I may say, however, that to my humor Lamb's let- 
ters are the rarest deUciae deliciariim, the most enjoyable 
reading, for this purpose in the world. 

Dickens's letters are valuable beyond those of most later 
English moderns for their brave and hopeful spirit. 

Books of autobiography are good, so that they be not too 
veracious, like Franklin's — a defect which pertaineth not to 
the far preferable Messer Cellini. Memoirs and personal 
chronicles I would not forbid, though the Pepysian hunt has 
been run to death, out of compliment to the modern fashion 
of glorifying the Indecent Past, and is too often the mark of 
snobbery and a vulgar soul. A man shall not leave the empy- 
rean of the poets to put his eye to chamber keyholes and his 
nose to chamber pots with Samuel Pepys. . . . 

Still, I would not deny that there be some engaging scoun- 
drels, like Cagliostro and the before mentioned Cellini, with 
whom one may have profitable commerce in bed — a thing 
that during the lives of these worthies never chanced to any 
man or, more especially, any woman. 

But enough for the present. 




On Letters. 

HE pleasantest thing in the world to receive is a 
good letter. 

Our dearest literary joys are not to be weighed 
in comparison; indeed they are not at all of the 
argument, for we share them with many. But a 
letter — a true letter I would say — belongs to us in an inti- 
mate and peculiar sense; something in ourselves has sum- 
moned it, and perhaps the deepest source of our pleasure is, 
that it could not have been written to another. 

For it takes two to make a true letter — one to inspire and 
one to write it; one to summon and one to send. 

Such a letter is the child of love, and we rightly hold our- 
selves blessed for it. A few such letters — none of us can ex- 
pect many — make shining epochs in our lives. 

But these letters are of the rarest, and I would now speak 
rather of such as we may not too uncommonly hope to re- 
ceive, supposing (egotistically) we have that in us which has 
grace to summon them. 

A genuine letter is the best gift and proof of friendship. 
No man can write it who is only half or three-quarters your 
friend ; he might give you money — this he could not give. 

I have sometimes been convinced that a man was heartily 
my friend until I received a letter from him which showed 
me my error. Not indeed that such was his desire, nor could 
I point out the word or phrase that enlightened me. I knew 
— that was all. 

This will, perhaps, seem the very opposite of the truth to 
persons who have never considered the matter deeply and 
who think nothing is so easily given and obtained as a letter. 
But I am writing for those who understand. 



ON LETTERS 97 

If you have ever been deceived in your dreams of friend- 
ship, look now over those old letters you kept, and you will 
wonder how you could have cheated yourself; the truth you 
were once blind to, stares out from every written page. It 
was there always, but your self-love would not see. 

Into every real letter the soul of the writer passes. It is 
this that gives a fabulous value to the letters of great and 
famous persons concerning whom the world is ever curious — 
makers of history, poets, warriors, kings and criminals, 
queens and courtesans, all who for good or evil cause have 
gained a lasting renown. The collectors are justified by a 
psychology which few of them can penetrate. 

The letters of some persons who have lived and of whom 
we possess not a scrap of writing, would be absolutely price- 
less. 

Is there, for example, enough worth in money to estimate 
the value of a letter written by the hand of Jesus? Can you 
imagine anything that would so thrill the world ? . . . 

Or, to take a lower and more probable instance : A First 
Folio of Shakespeare is worth several thousand dollars, and 
the owner of one never has to haggle for his price — the book 
itself is the ready money. The number of copies in the world 
is accurately known, as well as the fortunate owners. Some 
rich men are content with the distinction of possessing this 
rare volume and they would like to have the fact mentioned 
on their tombstone. Well, a genuine letter of Shakespeare's 
— say to "Mr. W. H.," for example — would probably be 
worth more than all the First Folios in existence. True, the 
poet had hardly a thought or sentiment or idea that he did 
not express somewhere in his plays or poems. No matter — 
these were of public note, in the way of his calling; what the 
world wants is a look into the innermost soul of the man 
Shakespeare, who has escaped amid the glory of the poet. A 
letter! a letter! 

Charles Lamb offers a notable proof of the superiority of 



98 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

genuine letters over mere literary compositions. He wrote 
many letters to his friends from his high stool in Leadenhall 
street; letters that have never been equaled for quaint humor, 
shrewd-glancing observation, kindly comment on men and 
manners, and, above all, the intimate revelation of one of 
the most charming personalities ever known. Being thrifty 
in a literary sense, and by no means a ready writer — he speaks 
of composing with "slow pain" — it was his habit to make his 
personal letters do a double service by turning them into 
essays for the press — and, generally, spoiling them. At any 
rate, I prefer the letters. 

The truth behind this matter is, that if a man be capable, 
and make a practice of, writing many good letters, he will 
surely fall off in other lines of literary effort. Renan discov- 
ered this early in his career and was very sparing of letters 
which took anything out of him in a literary way. One 
might call this sort of economy, keeping the honey for the 
hive. It is not a bad plan in a thrifty sense, but this article 
can not sympathize with it, as it makes for the poverty of 
letters. 

Still, the fact doesn't matter so much, as literary people of 
the professional sort are generally bad letter-writers, for the 
reason that they bring to letter-writing the dregs of their 
minds — saving their spirit, grace, naturalness and sincerity 
for the shop. I have been astonished by the inept, spiritless 
letters of two* or three authors of my acquaintance who are 
famous for their wit and brilliancy. One of them tells me 
that it is easier for him to write an article of two thousand 
words than a letter of two hundred. The assured audience 
and the certain compensation draw his power, but the letter 
doesn't seem worth while— and isn't when he's done with it. 

Still, there are exceptions, even among literary persons, and 
especially among women who, literary or unliterary, write 
the best letters in the world. Bless their kind hearts and busy 
fertile minds ! Should I ever be able to acknowledge the debt 



ON LETTERS 99 

I owe them ? — To pay it were not possible, even in dreams. 
There is dear "E. W. W.'\ who came, a late blessing into my 
life, just when I sorely needed such a friend, and who sends 
me frequently of her rich store of wisdom and sweetness and 
strength, though her pen knows no rest and the publishers will 
not be denied. Strange! — I find in these gracious letters, 
alive with the breath of her spirit, something that even she is 
unable to express in her public writings — or is it the vitality 
of the personal note, the instant flow from mind to mind, that 
makes me think so? . . . There is charming "T. G.", more 
beautiful even than her poetry, who writes too seldom, 
(thriftiest she of the daughters of the Muse!), but each of 
whose joyous letters fills with light the happy week of its 
arrival. And "D. H.'\ who was not long ago "D. M."— 
what pleasure have I not received from her demure gayety 
and the sweet cordial note of her letters ! . . . And U E. 
R.'\ who was even more recently "E. H." (ah, happy he who 
won her gracious youth!) — in what book shall I find a hint 
of her tricksy humor and bewitching pertness ? . And 

"B. A.", whose pensive spirit ever seeking the Unknown, 
often startles me with its clear divinations — the privilege of 
the white-souled. . . . And U T. S.", whose prattling pen 
has given me cheer when weary and cast down, and who is so 
near to me in faith and sympathy, though I have never looked 
into her candid eyes. And "S. B.", the sweet silent Quakeress, 
who too rarely writes, and the thought of whom often lies 
like a sinless peace upon me. But let me cite no more lest I 
tempt the envious fates by a rash disclosure of my joys. 

All these most fragrant friendships, enriching my else 
flowerless life with beauty and grace and precious consola- 
tion, — giving me indeed the rarer life of the spirit, — do I, 
though undeserving, hol6 . . . through letters. 




Cbe Kings. 

T IS still summer with the kings, God save them ! 
— a summer that has lasted for many of them 
over a thousand years. They make as brave a 
show to-day as ever in the past. It is said they 
are neither loved nor feared so much as of old, 
and I know not how that may be ; but of this I am sure, that 
the glory of kings is the envy of the world. The sunlight 
gilds their palaces and royal capitals and strikes through the 
many-hued windows of their cathedrals in which they deign 
to accept a homage second only to that paid to Divinity itself. 
God is in His heaven, and they are on their hundred thrones. 
And these thrones are quite as safe to-day as in the olden 
time when few or none doubted that the kings were set upon 
them by Divine Will. Thousands of armed men watch day 
and night to guard their peace. Cannon flank the entrances 
to their castles and palaces. The life of the king is the chief 
care and preoccupation of every people — many starve that he 
may live as befits his royal state — many die in battle that his 
throne may be secure. Yet it is true, as in the olden time, that 
a king falls now and then under the assassin's hand ; and the 
wisdom of man has never rightly explained this seeming fail- 
ure of the providence of God. But there is a lot for kings as 
for common men, and accidents prove nothing. Kingship is 
still the best job in the world — and there are no resignations. 
Once in a while, it is true, an abdication has to be declared 
on account of the imbecility of some crowned head — but 
think how long kings have been breeding kings ! What won- 
der that the distemper should now and then break out in the 
royal stud? 

It is summer with the kings. They have never been a cost- 



THE KINGS 101 

Her luxury than they are to-day, except that they are not suf- 
fered to make war so often. Yet the world continues to pay 
the price of kings with gladness, and though we have heard so 
much of the rising tide of democracy, it has not wet the foot 
of a single throne in our time. No doubt it will sweep over 
them all some day, but our children's children shall not see it. 
There is hardly a king in Europe whose tenure is not quite as 
good as that of our glorious Republic. Kingship is even a 
better risk than when Canute set his chair in the sands of the 
shore. Wrap it up in what shape of mortality you please — let 
it look out boldly from the eyes of a real king, as rarely hap- 
pens; let it peer from under the broken forehead of a fool or 
ogle in the glances of a hoary old Silenus, — it is still the one 
thing in the world which absolutely compels reverence. Other 
forms of authority are discounted more and more; the Pope 
who once had rule over kings, sees his sovereignty dwindled 
to a garden's breadth; the chiefs of republics wield a preca- 
rious power, often without respect: the glory that hedges a 
king remains undiminished and unaltered. The kings owe 
much to God, and God owes something to the kings — when 
the world shall have seen the last of these, it will perhaps dis- 
card the old idea of Divinity. But, as I have said already, 
that will take a long, long time — so long that it is quite use- 
less to form theories on the subject. 

It is summer with the kings. Nowhere such radiant, golden 
summer as in royalty-loving Germany. There big thrones and 
little thrones — such a lot of them ! — are all sound and safe — 
sounder and safer than some of the royal heads that peer out 
from them. There the play of kingship has been played with 
the best success to an audience that seldom criticizes and never 
gets tired nor steals away between the acts. If the good God 
composed this play, — as so many people piously believe, — 
then He must hold the honest Germans in special favor — as 
an author He can not but be flattered. That he does so hold 



102 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

them is evident from his permitting them to triumph over 
those incomparably better actors, the French. 

This charming, prosaic, joyous, antiquated, picturesque, 
yet somewhat dull pageant of royalty goes on in Germany 
forever. If it ever came to a stop for but one day, we may be 
sure the honest sun that has beamed approvingly upon it for 
centuries would do likewise. The people fully believe that 
God wrote the play, and they cling the more fondly to the 
belief for the reason aforesaid — that it is, like themselves, a 
little dull. And what matters the sameness of the plot or the 
occasional incapacity of the leading actors, since the proper- 
ties are as rich as ever and the stage-setting worthy of the 
best representations of the past? 

God is the favorite playwright of the German people. And 
never has He given them a prettier interlude than the mar- 
riage t'other day of the Crown Prince and the Duchess Ce- 
celia. This charming spectacle moved the admiration of the 
world and the envy of republics. It was a gala show of roy- 
alties and nobilities. At the grand performance in the Royal 
Opera House in Berlin, seventy princes and princesses sur- 
rounded the imperial family — German highnesses are reso- 
lutely opposed to race-suicide and even take unnecessary mor- 
ganatic precautions against it. The display of diamonds and 
jewels, of exquisite laces and gorgeous millinery, by the royal 
and noble ladies, out-tongued the praise of a hundred pens. 
Finer birds, more beautiful plumage, have not been seen since 
the last days of Versailles. The Empress Augusta Victoria, 
we read, wore a necklace of fabulous gems — (it is whispered 
that she is grown too fat for the War Lord's taste). The 
princesses vied with each other in exhibiting the wealth of 
their caskets. But the royal bride was unadorned, says the 
report, "save by her personal graces." What a pity that these 
graces were not the first to kindle the heart of the Crown 
Prince, who is known to have had a passion or two of the 
theatre ! 



THE KINGS 103 

At the wedding in the palace chapel and the after-festivi- 
ties in the White Hall, there was such a crush of royalties, 
highnesses, nobilities and excellencies, that the minute eti- 
quette of precedence was preserved only with the greatest 
difficulty. It is recorded, however, that nothing occurred to 
scandalize the Hohenzollem traditions or the Kingdom of 
Heaven. 

The gifts to these young persons (who have had the great 
kindness to be born) beggared all description. They poured 
in from all the Prussian provinces, from all the potentates of 
Europe, from the tattooed and savage sovereigns of the 
South Seas, from the long-skulled monarchs of the Melane- 
sian archipelago, from kings whose royal councils are punc- 
tuated by the jabber of apes. Japan, at the very moment 
when she was conquering a foremost place among nations, 
sent, with exquisite taste, a pair of antique silver flower 
bowls. The Sick Man of Europe begged to be remembered 
by the great and good friend who has nursed him through 
some bad dreams. Even the Pope, who sees in that mar- 
riage and all connected with it the triumph of Luther and 
the work of the Devil, failed not of his devoir to a brother 
sovereign. 

Still, these foreign tributes were but as a drop to the deep 
sea of German loyalty and love. For while one part of the 
nation worships a Roman Catholic God and the other a 
Protestant God, both agree in paying homage to the throne 
which supports each altar. So honest Hans sweated to express 
the fulness of his joy and duty. Substantial were his gifts. A 
hundred loyal cities joined to offer a bridal gift of a silver 
service of a thousand pieces — Hans will sweat three years in 
the making of it and longer maybe in paying for it. No mat- 
ter — payment is the proof of loyalty. When was there ever a 
king or a god that was not in constant need of money ? . . . 

Yes, it is summer with the kings and never have they 
seemed safer on their hundred thrones. But now as ever in 



io4 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

the long story of kingship, their safety lies not so much in 
their castles and forts, their armies and sentinels, their myriad 
spies and their hundred-handed police. Not so much in these 
things as in the sufferance of the patient people and also their 
childlike enjoyment of the old play. 

Is God the author of this play? Many a man believes it in 
Germany whose ears are not longer than they should be. 
And it seems certain that the reputation of God as a play- 
wright will last longer in Germany than elsewhere. The 
royal and noble claque is thoroughly organized and never 
misses its cue. Besides, many small but worthy people — 
prompters, scene-shifters, stage carpenters, costumers, supers 
and other gens du theatre — draw their living from the great 
comedy and would speedily come to grief if by any chance the 
public should tire of it. So the good God is concerned for 
these honest people as much as for his literary repute — and 
the show goes on. From time to time the end of the play is 
predicted, but it has had a famous run and it will surely keep 
the boards — while there is summer with the kings. 

(£• KC& to* 

Some time ago I wrote that it was summer with the kings, 
but wondrous is the change wrought within a few short 
months. Now instead of golden summer, with the courtier 
sun gilding their palaces and domes and towers, and all the 
world eager to win a smile of them, a ray of royal favor, — 
there is winter, black with dread, lurid with rebellion, and 
sinister with every threat of treason and anarchy. 

Though the kings yet hold some show of sovereignty, they 
are as prisoners in their own strong places, beleaguered by the 
victorious people and feeling no trust in the very guards of 
their person. The grand palaces are closed up and deserted, 
and the splendid cathedrals, in which so often the Te Deum 
has been raised in celebration of some royal victory, are now 
dark and silent, save for the threnody of mourning bells. 



THE KINGS 105 

Yes, it is winter with the kings. Panic, terror and wild- 
eyed unrest hold the place of that mailed security which has 
sate at scornful ease there during a thousand years. The 
kings look fearfully forth from their strong towers and cas- 
tles, marking the flames of revolution that creep steadily 
nearer and hearing the distant shouts of the advancing army 
of rebellion. No heart of grace do the kings find in the thick- 
ness of the encompassing walls or the yet unbroken ranks of 
their soldiery. For every wind is now the courier of some 
new treason or blow at their power. Fealty is become a snare 
that watches its chance to kill or betray — he that rides forth 
with the royal command shall turn traitor ere yet he hath 
passed the shadow of the towers. It is marvelous how loy- 
alty deserts a falling king ! 

Come now the priests in their most gorgeous vestments 
and bearing their most sacred images to cheer and console 
the dejected monarch. Of their fidelity he is at least assured, 
for to him and him alone they owe the grandeur of their 
state. But alas ! what are priests to a king who has lost his 
people? — nay, they but remind him in his bitter despair of 
that Power which "hath put down the mighty from their 
seat and hath exalted them of low degree." Idly as he had 
often marked the solemn words, they come back to him now 
with a terrible weight of meaning. Almost he could bring 
himself to spit upon these fawning priests who had ever 
feared to show him the naked purport of the accusing text 
that now pierces his heart like a sword. And he turns away 
from their mummeries lest he should cry out against the 
treachery of their God and his who has thus abandoned him 
in his need. 

It is winter with the kings. That old habit of loyalty and 
obedience which held their thrones as if mortised and ten- 
oned in granite, has vanished in an hour. Oh, the kings can 
not see how long it took to mine and shatter their rock of 
sovereignty, and they blindly regard as the madness of a 



106 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

moment what has been the patient labor of centuries. Do 
not flout them in their fallen state by telling them that no 
hands wrought so busily at the work of destruction as their 
own. Have pity on the humbled kings ! 

But wait ! — all can not yet be lost. Call in the leaders of 
the people and let us pledge our kingly word anew to grant 
the things they ask. 'Tis but a moment's humiliation and 
the fools will be content and huzza themselves back into our 
royal favor. Think you we do not know the cattle? Ho, 
there ! — let the varlets be brought into our presence. 

Alas, Sire ! — it is now too late. Hard though it be to credit, 
the besotted people — pardon, Sire, for reporting the accursed 
heresy — have at last abandoned that to which they fondly 
clung in anguish and misery and trial, against even the evi- 
dence and reason of their brute minds, and in spite of all that 
your royal ancestors could do to alienate and destroy — their 
faith in kings ! 

But this is madness ! — it can not be. What will the infat- 
uate, misguided wretches do without their sovereign? An- 
swer us that ! 

Craving your gracious pardon, Sire, they will do as well as 
they can. And from what we, your humble councillors, can 
learn, they expect to make shift with a saucy jade wear- 
ing a Phrygian cap, whom they name Liberty ! . . . 

It is winter with the kings, but summer with the peoples 
who have waited long enough for their turn. Lustily are 
they girded up and made ready for the gleaning. Boldly and 
unitedly they march upon the ripe and waiting fields which, 
so often sowed with their blood and sweat, they now claim 
for their own. God grant they may bring the harvest home! 



Cbe Song Chat is Solomon's. 




[JHERE is always a Jewish renaissance and that is 
why we have lately been talking about the beau- 
ty of the Jewess. 

It is a great theme and there is none other in 
the world charged with more sweet and terrible 
poetry. 

The beauty of the Jewish women is the eternal witness of 
the great epic of the Bible. If that divine Book were to be 
lost in some unthinkable catastrophe, it could be re-written 
wholly from the lips and eyes of Jewish beauty. 

In no long time we should have again the complete stories 
of Sarah and the daughters of Lot (those forward but prov- 
ident young persons) ; of tender-eyed Leah, of Rebekah and 
Rachel, sweet rivals in love; of Deborah and Hagar and 
Jael ; of Ruth, that pensive figure whom so many generations 
have strained to see, "standing breast-high amid the corn;" 
of Rahab the wise harlot and Jezebel the furious; of Tamar 
who played her father-in-law Judah so shrewdly wanton a 
trick; of Esther who fired the heart of the Persic king, saving 
honest Mordecai a painful ascension and much slaughter of 
the Chosen People ; of Susanna, whom the elders surprised in 
her bath, not the first nor the last instance of the folly of old 
men: of the nameless wife of Uriah, the lust for whose per- 
fect body drove the holy king David to blood-guiltiness; of 
the Shulamite (also lacking a name) whom Solomon, son of 
David, has sung to the world's ravishment; lastly — why not? 
— of her who has glorified Israel among the Gentiles and 
hath honor beyond all the daughters of the earth, — Mary of 
Bethlehem. 

In this way, I repeat, the Bible could easily be put together 



108 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

again — it can never perish while a Jewish woman remains 
on the earth. 

There never was a book written (worthy of the name) 
but that was more or less directly inspired by a woman. 
Cherchez la femme is the true theory of literary origins. 

This is eminently true of the Bible with which women 
have had (and still have) more to do than with any other 
book in the history of the world. 

The beauty of Jewish women is a wine that needs no 
bush ; it is the sacred treasure that kept alive the hope of the 
race during the weary ages of shame and bondage. But for 
that jealously guarded talisman, the Jew would long ago 
have lost both place and name upon the earth. 

Much of the old, consecrated, fatidic character attaches to 
the Jewish woman of the better class, even in this faithless 
day. She is honored above the wife of the Gentile and she 
is conscious of a mission which fills her with the pride of an 
immemorial race. One fancies that no other woman either 
inspires or returns love in such measure as the Jewess; that 
she has some profound joys to give whose secret she alone 
possesses. The Jew has found in his home compensations for 
all the cruelty and ignominy which he has had to suffer from 
the world. 

I admire true Jewish beauty so much that I would make a 
slight discrimination. Not all the Grecian women were 
Helens and it need not be said that the highest type of beauty 
among Jewish women is less often seen than praised. In 
truth, the rule holds good here, that great beauty and great 
ugliness are found side by side. 

One reason for this is, undoubtedly, the bad taste of the 
average Jew, who can not have his women fat enough and 
who, therefore, encourages such departures from the ideal 
standard as serve to caricature the natural beauty and comeli- 
ness of Hebrew women. I believe there are Jews who would 
like to grow their women in a tub, according to the mediaeval 



THE SONG THAT IS SOLOMON'S 109 

method of producing monstrosities. This bad taste the Jew 
comes by as a part of his Oriental inheritance — the Turk 
similarly fattens his women with all kinds of sweetmeats and 
suets. On account of this vicious taste among too many 
Jews, one often sees women of hideous corpulence at thirty 
who were types of ideal beauty at sixteen. Flesh is a good 
thing, but the Jew should not seek to suffocate himself in it, 
like Clarence in his Malmsey butt. And pus is not pulchri- 
tude. 

Let the Jewish woman, therefore, vigilantly cherish the 
wonderful beauty which has come down to her from those 
historic sisters of her race whom kings desired with a pas- 
sion that kindled the land to war, whom prophets and sages 
glorified, with whom heroes and martyrs walked and con- 
cerning whom God Himself has written many of the best 
pages in His own Book. Let her keep as near as she can to 
the ideal of loveliness which the great king, drunk with 
beauty and rapture, pictured thousands of years ago in the 
lineaments of his Beloved : — 

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet and thy speech is 
comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within 
thy locks. 

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins 
which feed among the lilies. 

Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honey comb; honey 
and milk are under thy tongue and the smell of thy garments 
is as the smell of Lebanon. 

Thy neck is like a tower of ivory. Thine head upon thee 
is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple: the 
king is held in the galleries. How fair and how pleasant art 
thou, O love, for delights ' 




Dining with Schopenhauer. 




WAS dining lately at Mouquin's, alone. You 
had better not so dine there, unless you have 
reached that melancholy climacteric, "a certain 
age" — (I do not plead guilty myself). It is 
not good for men to dine alone at Mouquin's 
and it is even worse for Mouquin's. All here is planned for 
sociability and the sexes — the menu is a paean of sex as 
frankly declarative as a poem of Walt Whitman's; the 
wines, the suave, lightfooted French waiters (really French), 
seeing all and nothing, the softly refulgent electric bulbs, 
the very genius of the place, all bespeak that potent instinct 
which harks back to the morning of the world. One sees 
it in the smallest matters of detail and arrangement. Else- 
where there is room and entertainment for the selfish male, 
but here — go to! The tables are not adapted for solitary 
dining; at the very tiniest of them there is room for two. 
An arrangement that would have moved the irony of Schop- 
enhauer and signalizes the grand talent of Monsieur Mou- 
quin. To conclude, a solitary diner is an embarrassment, a 
reproach, a fly in the ointment of Monsieur Mouquin. I was 
all three to him lately, but I make him my most profound 
apologies — it shall not occur again. Why, I am now to tell. 
I was dining at Mouquin's alone, and it seemed as if the 
spirit of Schopenhauer suddenly descended upon me, who had 
been there so often, joyous and joyously companioned. The 
waiter took my order with a veiled hint of disapproval in 
his manner. He forgot, too, that he was of Mouquin's and 
therefore, anteriorly of Paris — he spoke English far too 
well for the credit of the house. At Mouquin's, you know, 
the wines and the waiters are alike imported. I knew what 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER in 

the waiter was thinking about — I felt and understood his 
subtly insinuated reproach : I was alone. There was no 
person of the opposite sex with me to double or treble the bill 
and toi obey whose slightest hinted wish the garcon would fly 
with winged feet, a la Mercure. Decidedly it is a violence 
to the Parisian waiter to dine alone at Mouquin's, for it robs 
him of that pleasing incentive which is essential to the per- 
fect exhibition of his art. I do not qualify the phrase — the 
French waiter at Mouquin's is an artist, and never more so 
than when he rebukes me, wordlessly and without offence, 
for dining alone. 

However, I was a good deal worse than being alone or in 
company, for have I not said that Schopenhauer was with 
me? Do you know Schopenhauer? Is he anything more 
than a name to you, — that giant sacker of dreams, that deadly 
dissector of illusions, that pitiless puncturer of the poetry of 
the sexes, that daring exposer of Nature's most tenderly 
cherished and vigilantly guarded secrets, whose thought still 
lies like a blight upon the world? Do you know his beautiful 
theory of love which is as simple as the process of digestion 
and indeed very similar to it. Once in Berlin an enthusiast 
spoke in Schopenhauer's presence of the "immortal passion." 
The Master turned upon him with his frightful sneer and 
asked him if his bowels were immortal ! 

When Actaeon surprised the chaste Diana at her bath, he 
was merely torn to pieces by his own hounds. Schopenhauer's 
punishment for betraying the deepest arcana of nature was 
worse, yet not worse than the crime merited — he was com- 
pelled to eat his own heart! . . . Not, I grant you, a 
cheerful table-mate for a dinner at Mouquin's, when the 
lights glow charmingly and the bustling waiters, the incoming 
guests, the rustling of skirts, the low laughter indicative of 
expectancy, and the confused yet agreeable murmur of voices 
— the bass or baritone of the men mingled with the lighter 
tones of the women — announce a joyous evening. Charming 



1 1 2 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

fugue, in which a delicate ear may detect every note of appe- 
tite and passion, though the players use the surd with the 
most artistic precaution. (Mouquin's is the most discreet 
and admirably regulated of cafes). Polite overture to the 
orgasm of the Belly-God and perhaps to the satisfaction of 
certain allied divinities whom I may not specialize. Admir- 
able convention, by which men and women come in sacri- 
ficial garments, or evening attire, to worship at the shrine of 
the Flesh. 

But why drag in Schopenhauer? — do not some guests come 
unbidden to every banquet, and is it within our power to 
decline their company? Let us be thankful if at least we do 
not have tx> take them to bed with us. 

The climacteric, perhaps? My dear sir, when I tip the 
waiter to-night, I can get him to say easily that I am not a 
day over thirty. 

Throughout the large room (we are upstairs, gentle 
reader) the tables are filling rapidly with well-dressed men 
and women. Nothing in their appearance, generally, to 
challenge remark ; a conventional crowd of male and female 
New Yorkers, intent on a good dinner and subsidiary enjoy- 
ments. For the first time, perhaps, I notice how pleasant 
it is to observe everything at leisure, without having to talk 
to any one — you really can not see things in a detached, 
philosophic manner when you have to jabber to a pretty 
woman. 

A clerical-looking gentleman with a severe forehead, is 
one of my near neighbors. His companion is a handsome 
young woman, rather highly colored, who seems more at 
home than the forehead. A couple take the table next to 
mine; the young fellow is well-looking enough, the girl has 
the short, colorless, indeterminate, American face, with its 
pert resolve to be pretty; both are young and have eyes only 
for each other — that's the point. They sit down to the 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 113 

table as if preparing for the event of their lives ; this eager 
young expectancy is smilingly noted by others than myself. 

A large man convoying three heavy matronly women who 
yet do not look like mothers — you know that familiar New 
York type — takes a favorable station against the wall where 
there is much room for eating and whence the outlook is com- 
manding. The large one perjures himself fearfully in ex- 
plaining how he had it specially reserved. I know him for a 
genial liar, and maybe the ladies do, too. These four have 
evidently come to eat and drink their fill, and to look on : 
Schopenhauer is no concern of theirs, nor they of his. 

Not so this elderly man with the dashing young woman on 
his arm — the man is too handsome to be called old, in spite 
of his white hair. The young woman has that look of com- 
plete self-possession and easy tolerance which such young 
women commonly manifest toward their elderly admirers — 
this is not romance, but what is generically termed the "sure 
thing." Schopenhauer is but faintly interested, and my eyes 
wander toward the little American type. She has had her 
second glass of wine by this time and it has hoisted a tiny 
flag in her cheek. A little more and she will succeed in her 
determination to be pretty — the dinner is only half under 
way. Schopenhauer bids me note that she eats now with 
undisguised appetite, and that she fixes a steadier gaze upon 
her young man than he can always meet. Both young heads 
are together and they eat as fast as they talk — but youth 
atones for all. These two continue to draw the gaze of 
most persons in their vicinity. 

There have been one or two mild selections by the orches- 
tra, but they passed unnoticed in the first stern business of 
eating. It is a pity that artists should be subjected to such 
an indignity, but it can not well be avoided by artists who 
play for hungry people. The leader of Mouquin's orches- 
tra — perhaps I should say the orchestra at Mouquin's — is a 
young man with a high forehead and long hair. I am not a 



1 14 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

critic of music, like my friend James Huneker, and I am 
unhappy in the difficult vocabulary which that gifted writer 
employs. But it seems to me the conductor and first violin- 
ist at Mouquin's is an artist. A veritable artist! No doubt 
I shall be laughed at for this — I have said that I am ignorant 
of the technique of criticism. 

When the orgasm of eating had in a degree subsided, 
Schopenhauer nudged me to observe how the company began 
to give some attention to the music and even to applaud a lit- 
tle. Ah, it was then the young leader seemed grand and 
inspired, to me. He looked as if he did not eat much him- 
self; and his music — something from Tannhauser — fell on 
my ears like a high rebuke to these guzzling men and women. 
I do not know for sure what the "motif" of it was (this 
word is from Mr. Huneker), but the refrain sounded to me 
like, "Do not be swine! Do not be swine!" 

The swine were in no way abashed — perhaps they did not 
understand the personal allusion. I have read somewhere in 
Mr. Huneker that the Wagnerian "motif is often very dif- 
ficult to follow. 

We had reached the coffee, that psychic moment when the 
world is belted with happiness; when all our desires seem 
attainable; when with facile assurance we discount the most 
precious favors of love or fortune. 

"You will now observe," whispered my invisible guest, 
"that with these animals the present is the acute or critical 
moment of digestion, from which result many unclaimed 
children and much folly in the world. The edge of appetite 
has been dulled, but there is still a desire to eat, and the stage 
of repletion is yet to be reached. These animals now think 
themselves in a happy condition for the aesthetic enjoyment 
of art and even for the raptures of love. They have been 
fed." 

The terrible irony of the tone, more than the words, 
caused me to turn apprehensively; but no one was listening, 



DINING WITH SCHOPENHAUER 115 

and my hat and coat occupied the chair where should have 
sat my vis-a-vis. 

With the coming of the cordials and the lighting of cigar- 
ettes, the music changed to gayer measures. The young 
maestro's head was thrown back and in his eye flamed the 
fire of what I must call inspiration, in default of the proper 
phrase or hunekerism ; while his bow executed the most vivid 
lightning of melody. This was the moment of his nightly 
triumph, when his artist soul was in some degree compen- 
sated for the base milieu in which his genius had been set by 
an evil destiny. He now saw before him an alert, apprecia- 
tive audience, instead of an assembly of feeding men and 
women. For the moment he would not have changed places 
with a conductor of grand opera. 

"Note that foolish fellow's delusion," said Schopenhauer. 
"I have exposed it a hundred times. He thinks he is playing 
to the souls, the emotions of all these people, and he plumes 
himself upon his paltry art. They also are a party to his 
cheat. He is really playing to their stomachs, and their 
applause, their appreciation, is purely sensual. Yet I will 
not deny that he is doing them a service in assisting the pro- 
cess of digestion; but it is purely physiological, sheerly ani- 
mal. The question of art does not enter at all, any more than 
the question of love does in the mind of yonder old gentle- 
man who has ate and drunk too well and is now doting with 
senile desire upon that young woman." 

I noticed indeed that the elderly gentleman had become 
gay and amorously confidential, while his companion smiled 
often with affected carelessness, yet seemed to be curiously 
observant of his every word and gesture. But their affair 
was no matter for speculation. 

I glanced toward the clerical gentleman with the severe 
forehead. Both he and the forehead had relaxed perceptibly 
and there was evident that singular change which takes place 
when a man doffs the conventional mask of self. His lady 



1 1 6 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

friend seemed disposed to lead him further. No romance 

here "It is the stuff of all romances," snarled 

Schopenhauer. 

The heavy women waddled out once or twice to the retir- 
ing room and came back to drink anew. No man looked at 
them, save in idle curiosity — they were beyond tempt- 
ing or temptation. "These represent the consummate 
flowers of the sexual or passional instinct," remarked 
the sage. "Gross as they now seem, they were once 
young and what is called desirable. They yielded fully 
to their animal requirements — they ate, drank and loved, or 
to speak more correctly, digested — with such results as we 
now see." 

I shuddered . . . but the large women were in- 
dubitably enjoying themselves. 

There was more music — the guests applauded ever the 
more generously. The leader now condescended like a verit- 
able artist — a has le cafe! 

I noticed that my little American beauty left the room 
(without her wraps) a bit unsteadily, and came back pres- 
ently, very high in color. A drink was waiting for her, and 
she began talking with her young man as if she and he were 
alone in the world. I noticed also that the young man carried 
his liquor rather better and seemed to shrink a little under the 
eyes attracted by the girl's condition. In my ear I heard the 
sardonic whisper of Schopenhauer: 

"They call this love!" . . . 

I would rather dine with a pretty woman at Mouquin's or 
elsewhere, than with any philosopher, living or dead. Espe- 
cially Schopenhauer: a has the climacteric! 



In praise of Life. 




ragtags 



HAVE to thank the many loyal friends who 
gave me their sympathy and support during an 
illness that cut nearly three months out of my 
working calendar and suspended two issues of 
The Papyrus. To have learned that there 
is such a stock of pure kindness in the world, is worth even 
the price I paid for it. 

The desire of life prolongs it, say the doctors. 'Tis true, 
and when the wish for life gets its force from the strong 
motive of doing one's chosen work in the only world we 
surely know, then is Death driven back and to Life goes the 
victory. 

Oh! Life, Life, how much better art thou than the shad- 
owy hope of an existence beyond the grave ! I can hold thee, 
taste thee, drink thee, wrap myself in thee— thou art a most 
dear reality and not a shadow. I kneel before thee and pro- 
claim myself more than ever thy true lover, believer and 
worshiper. Let me still be a joyous living pagan and I 
will not change with all the saints that have spurned thee 
and gone their pale way to Nothingness. I breathe thy 
warm, perfumed air as one newly escaped from the ante- 
chamber of Death. It is the last week of May — sweet May, 
I had thought never to see thee again ! — and the whole 
world is fragrant with lilac. It is an efflorescence of life 
and hope and joy, Nature's largess after the dearth and 
desolation of winter. My soul is inundated with the golden 
waves of light and warmth and melody. Something of the 
sweetness and vague longing of adolescence revives in my 
breast. My heart trembles with a sudden memory of old 
loves, a memory called up by the sunshine and lilac scents 



1 1 8 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

and bird music with which the glad world is running over. 
Youth smiles a sly challenge at me and love holds forth his 
ineffable promise. I am drunk with the rapture of May — 
for I live ... I live ... I live ! 



Henley the brave, who not long ago captained his soul out 
into the Infinite, was moved by his experiences in hospital to 
write some of his most striking poems. No doubt there is 
matter enough for a poignant sort of poetry in the House of 
Sickness. But literary inspiration fails a man when both his 
mind and body are disintegrating. I have brought nothing 
from my white nights in the hospital, but I left there a good 
deal of myself corporeally and something — as I am ad- 
monished by a present difficulty in writing — of my admirable 
literary style. I think with pain and shame of the utter 
weakness to which I was then reduced, and I wince at the 
recollection of some concessions wrung from dismantled na- 
ture. I do not care to reflect upon the long blank hours, or 
days, or weeks, during which I kept my bed in passive en- 
durance, or upon one terrible night when I waited for what 
seemed to be the End with such courage as I could command. 
According to the Christian precept, I should have seen in all 
this the hand of chastening and meekly accepted the portion 
dealt out to me. But had I yielded to this comfortable sort 
of spiritual cowardice, I should probably not be alive to tell 
the story. Many good Christians are thus soothed out of 
this weary life into a better world, for a mental attitude of 
pious resignation is the hardest condition with which the doc- 
tor has to contend and an unrivaled fattener of graveyards. 

In the next room to mine was a fine young man who had 
undergone an operation for appendicitis. The nurses told 
me there was no hope for him, as he had been brought in too 
late — the nurses never contradict the doctors. Poor fellow, 
I could hear his every sigh and groan in the vain but heroic 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 119 

struggle he was making for life. Presently a stout clean- 
shaven man in clerical garb passed my door. It was the 
minister. He remained about ten minutes with the young 
man, who was a member of his church. When he left I 
watched from my window and saw him mount his bicycle and 
ride away. He did not return. The young man died next 
day. I made up my mind more decidedly that I would get 
better. 

As a boy I used to read in my prayer book the supplication 
against the "evil of sudden death." In this is contained the 
very essence of the Christian idea, since death being synony- 
mous with judgment, must needs appear terrible to the soul 
unprepared. Indeed a sudden death in the case of an ir- 
religious person is always hailed as a judgment by people of 
strict piety. On the other hand, the favor of heaven is 
shown by the grace of a long sickness with its leisure for re- 
pentance and spiritual amendment. No picture is so edify- 
ing in a religious sense as that of the repentant sinner, over 
whom we are told there is more rejoicing in heaven than is 
called forth by the triumph of the just. Especially if the 
sinner have repented barely in time to be saved — that is the 
crucial point. If he should make his peace too soon, or if 
his repentance should come tardy off, it is not difficult to 
fancy the angels cheated of their due excitement. Such a 
blunderer would, I imagine, get more celestial kicks than 
compliments. God help us ! — I fear me these deathbed re- 
pentances are the sorriest farce acted in the sight of heaven. 

Yet farcical as they are, religion owes to them a great 
part of its dominion over the conscience of men. The Catho- 
lic faith, in particular, has invested the final repentance and 
absolution with a potency of appeal which few indeed are 
able to withstand. That is the meaning of the phrase, "Once 
a Catholic, always a Catholic." And there is doubtless a 
grandeur subduing the imagination in the proud position of 



izo PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

the Church, that no soul need be lost which has ever known 
her sacraments. Whatever the cold reason may make of this 
assumption, we may not forget how much it has contributed 
to the peace and consolation of humanity. 

As for myself, having had two long and desperate sick- 
nesses in the course of a half-dozen years, — having been so 
near the Veil which hides the Unknown that I could have 
touched it, — my prayer now and forever shall be : Lord, 
deny us not the blessing of sudden death. Even as quickly 
as Thou pleasest, call us hence, oh Lord ! 

To be at home once more in mine own place, to sit under 
the cheerful lamp with pipe and book, to taste the small 
honors of domestic sovereignty, to look forward with a quiet 
hope to the morrow's task, to watch the happy faces of the 
children in whom my youth renews itself, and to share the 
peace of her who has so long partnered my poor account of 
joy and sorrow — all this is a blessedness which I feel none 
the less that I do not weary a benign Providence with ful- 
some praise. 

Many pious works have been written on the incomparable 
advantage of being dead, — that is, on the superior felicity 
of the life to come. The most eloquent and convincing of 
these macabre essays were composed by a set of men who had 
resigned nearly all that makes life dear to humanity. It is 
enough to say that they knew not love, the most powerful 
tie that attaches us to life. On this account their valuable 
works no longer enjoy the great popularity which they had 
in a simpler time. Indeed, the decline of this religious Cult 
of Death is one of the marks of an advancing civilization. 
No doubt it served a humane purpose in those dark ages 
which we call the Ages of Faith, when life was far more 
cruel than it now is for the mass of mankind. Amid constant 
wars, bloodshed, oppression, famine and their attendant 
evils, from which only a privileged few were exempt, what 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 



121 



wonder that men turned eagerly to a gospel which to us 
seems charged with despair? So the ages of history during 
which hell was most completely and perfectly realized on 
this earth, were also those in which faith in heaven and the 
Church was universal. But with the slow growth of liberty 
and the partial emancipation of the human conscience during 
the past three centuries, there has gradually been formed a 
truer and better appreciation of life. The Cult of Death 
has lost its hold upon the masses, with the dissolution of the 
old terrible dogma of eternal punishment. Men are more in 
love with life at this day than ever in the past — with life, 
and love, and happiness, and freedom, all of which were 
more or less limited and tabooed in the blessed Ages of Faith. 
As Heine said, "Men will no longer be put off with promis- 
sory notes upon Heaven — they demand their share of this 
earth, God's beautiful garden." . . . 
Let us have life and ever more life ! 



£ 




SrjALZAC somewhere shrewdly observes the per- 
sistence of the vital spark in the sick in the 
crowded quarters of a great city where the 
strong current of human life rises to the full. 
It is a good thought and a cheering one. Life 
begets life and the desire of living: human companionship is 
almost the condition of existence. The hermits who have 
lived long in their solitude are memorable instances — be- 
cause there have been so few hermits. Secular age and health 
pass without comment in the immense human hives where 
they are too familiar to excite remark. The common notion 
that people live longer in the country than in the city, is 
wrong, like so many other received ideas: the truth is, they 
die earlier and faster in the country, and the earlier and the 
faster in direct ratio to the lack of companionship. Solitude 



122 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

is the best known aid to the madhouse and the cemetery — 
even the solitude of open fields and healthful skies. On the 
other hand, there are in the densely populated ghettos of 
Vienna, of London and of New York, surrounded by condi- 
tions that would seem to make health impossible, persons so 
old that time appears to have passed them by. 

Do you want to live and live long? — then be where men 
and women are living, loving and propagating life. Borrow 
from the universal vital force. Draw on the common fund 
of health and energy. Drink from the full-flowing stream of 
life. Deep calls unto deep and heart unto heart. With a 
million hearts around you, with a million pulses challenging 
and inciting your own, how can you fail to keep time to the 
great rhythmic harmony ? Fom all these you derive strength 
and hope and encouragement; every throb of every one of 
them all is a summons to live — to live — to live ! 

Now of this hear a proof. It seemed to me, as in an evil 
dream, that I had long been sad and dejected, brooding over 
uncertain health and poisoning my blood with the black vip- 
er-doubts that strike into the very heart of life; believing my 
heritage of length of days to be forfeited; shunning the 
cheerful society of my fellows; keeping alone with a swarm 
of morbid fears and fancies; looking on life with the lost 
gaze of one who divines everywhere an unseen but exultant 
and implacable enemy. 

Then, at last, I yielded to the bidding of a kinder spirit. I 
threw off the nightmare and mingled again with my kind. I 
went where men and women were merry with feast and 
dance, with wine and music and song. I looked for the joy 
of the human face and did not look in vain. I recovered in a 
moment my old birthright of hope and happiness. My heart, 
so long drooping, rose at the compelling summons of life 
about me : the old desire to live and love sprung up anew in 
me to hail the red flag in a woman's cheek and the bright 
challenge of her eyes. I filled my glass and at the bidding 




IN PRAISE OF LIFE 123 

of beauty and joy devoted my ancient sick fears to perdition. 
I was merry with the rest, aye, merry with the maddest; — 
and since that hour I live ... I live ... I 
live ! 

1C& t£& t^* 

jt| AM asked if, in my opinion, suicide is ever justi- 
fiable. 

The question is one for the individual con- 
science. Men and women are answering it with 
a dreadful yea, yea, ever}' day, casting away 
life as they might reject a worn-out garment. 

By social consent, founded on religious feeling, suicide is 
a crime against God. It is also held to be a crime against so- 
ciety. Persons attempting suicide and failing in the act are 
subject to the rigor of the law. No legal punishment is (of 
course) provided for those who succeed, but they do not 
escape in the next world — the churches take care of that: 
all theologians agree that the suicide is eternally reprobate 
and damned. 

I dissent utterly from this inhuman teaching, while I can 
conceive of no circumstances that would make suicide justi- 
fiable for myself. For so dissenting I shall be told that I 
render myself liable to damnation. Is it not strange that a 
man should be damned for holding too favorable an opinion 
of God? 

But it may not be so bad as that — we have only some 
men's word for it. 

We are told that hardly a soul comes into the world but 
at some time or other thinks of voluntarily quitting it, and is 
only restrained by the fear of eternal punishment. 

I would change this — I would make life here, present, 
hopeful and abundant, the restraining influence. I would pit 
Life against Death and turn my back on the kingdom of 
shadows. 



i2 4 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

I do not defend suicide, but I plead for the many upon 
whom fate imposes this bitter destiny. 

For myself I believe that life at the very worst is too pre- 
cious a gift to throw away. Steep me in shame and sorrow 
to the very lips, exile me from the charity of my kind, pile 
on my bare head all the abuses and humiliations which hu- 
man nature is capable of inflicting or enduring — my cry shall 
still and ever be for life, more life ! 

Though the wife of my youth should betray me again and 
again, though my children prove false and dishonor my gray 
hairs, though my oldest, truest friends abandon me and I be- 
come a "fixed figure for the hand of scorn to point his slow 
unmoving finger at," — still shall I cling to this boon of life — 
life— life ! 

For now I tell you, heart-burdened, weary and despairing 
ones, if only you will be patient a little longer and wait, life 
itself shall heal your every sorrow. 

I give you this Gospel of Hope, this water of refreshing 
in the arid desert of your despair — 

Life is the Healer, Life the Consoler, Life the Reconciler. 

In earlier years I used to hear the most eloquent sermons 
on the blessedness of death, which always left me cold and 
unpersuaded. To such gloomy homilies is perhaps due the 
aversion I now feel toward most preaching. No ! talk not 
to me of death, that ironic Phantom, that grisly Sophist by 
whose aid religion maintains the unworthiest part of her con- 
quest. I hate and abominate from my deepest soul this plau- 
sive, solemn, unctuous, lying cant of darkness and the grave. 
He that preaches fears it as much as he that hears and will 
move heaven and earth to escape the inevitable doom. Away 
with such mummery ! 

Death in the ripe course of nature is beautiful and seemly, 
but death by disease, or violence, or accident, is horrible, for 
no man should be cheated or cheat himself of his due share of 
life. And this which is now an empty axiom shall one day be 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 125 

the highest law of a better state of society than we yet dream 
of, wherein disease shall be unknown and death by violence, 
public, private, or judicial, a thing without precedent. 

My cry is for life — more life! 

Look, ye impatient ones ! — I, too, have been down, down, 
down in those abysmal depths where hope is a mockery and 
the mercy of God despaired of; I have tasted the bitterness 
of betrayal by those most sacredly pledged to keep faith with 
me ; I have known the uttermost treason of the heart ; I have 
been made to feel that there was not one soul in all the living 
world joined to me by any true or lasting bond; I have seen 
the destruction of my own house of life, that temple of the 
soul, losing which a man is homeless on the earth. 

And yet I rose out of this lowest hell of desolation, borne 
as I must believe by some late-succoring, strong-winged Angel 
of Hope — and blessed God to see again the cheerful face of 
life! 

Little children, little children, the end of all will come only 
too soon: why hasten it? The Master of Life has bidden 
you wait His summons. By my soul ! I do not believe that 
He would harshly reprove you or turn away His face should 
you, under the goad of sorrows too great for endurance, 
come suddenly, unbidden, before Him. Yet were it better to 
stand firm like good soldiers and abide your call. 

It is most strange that while men have killed other men, 
believing themselves to be inspired of God, no man has ever 
been credited with the same belief in killing himself. The 
courts of heaven, it would seem, are thronged with murder- 
ers who have been washed clean in the blood of the Lamb; 
but you shall see no suicide there. 

Is not this a monstrous conception — one that dishonors 
God? 

Why should the sinless suicide be damned to a rayless 
Hell while some bloody Alva or cruel Calvin is crowned 



126 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

with the salvation of the just? Why should there be hope for 
the slayer of age, the ravager of innocence, the despoiler of 
the widow and the orphan, and none at all for him who 
strikes only at his own life? Does God indeed choose His 
saints with so little care, or have we not here one of those per- 
versions that harden the hearts of men and "sweet religion 
make a rhapsody of words"? Let us deny this monstrous 
teaching of narrow-hearted men who presume to speak for 
God — let us say to all such in the words of Hamlet over the 
self-drowned Ophelia : 

"I tell thee, churlish priest, 
A ministering angel shall my sister be 
When thou liest howling!" 

Again I say, you are not to take your life on any terms : 
in other words, you are not to accept defeat. It is not that I 
would brand as coward the man who boldly pushes his way 
into the Unknown — the courage of that act is so appalling 
that men have named it madness. But it is a higher courage 
to resist the fates. 

Yet — whisper ! — I do not find it hard to believe that often 
God in His mercy shows this only way, this via dolorosa, to 
some poor lost soul, some victim of man's inhumanity, un- 
able to struggle longer in the coils of fate. 

To me the most awfully pathetic figure in a world sown 
with tragedy is the man or woman, broken on the cruel rack 
of life, who makes a desperate choice to find his or her way 
alone to God. Though you plant no cross and raise no stone 
upon that grave, though you hide it away from the sight of 
men, I for one shall not deem it a grave of shame. I shall 
kneel there in spite of priestly anathemas; I shall pray for 
this poor child of earth sainted by suffering; my tears shall 
fall on the despised grave where rests, — oh, rests well at last, 
— one of the uncounted martyrs of humanity. Yes ! I see in 




IN PRAISE OF LIFE 127 

that nameless grave huddled away in the potter's field a sym- 
bol of the tragedy of this life whereunto we are called with- 
out our will and whence we must not depart save in the pro- 
cess of nature. And I will believe that God rejects the poor 
defeated one lying there when I, a mere human father, feel 
my heart turned to stone against the weakest and most erring 
of my children. 



J AVE you ever really thought upon the beauty of 
this world which is passing away before your 
eyes? You have read the words, "The eye is 
not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hear- 
ing," but have you ever thought that they might 
bear another sense than the Holy Book gives them. 

For my part, when I come to die I know what my chief 
regret will be. Not for my poor human sins, which have 
really hurt nobody save myself and most of which I will have 
forgotten. Not because I have missed the laurel which was 
the darling dream of my youth. Not because I have always 
fallen short of my ideal and, still worse, betrayed my own 
dearest hopes. Not for the selfish reason that I have never 
been able to gain that position of independence and security 
which would enable me to work with a free mind. Not for 
having failed to score in any one particular what the world 
calls a success. Not for these nor any other of the vain de- 
sires that mock the human heart in its last agony. 

No ; I shall simply be sorry that I failed to enjoy so much 
of the beauty of this dear earth and sky, or even to mark it 
in my hurry through the days, my reckless pleasures, my stu- 
pid tasks that yielded me nothing. I shall think with utter 
bitterness of the time out of all the time given me I might 
have passed in profitably looking at the moon. Or in mark- 



128 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

ing with an eye faithful to every sign, the advance of the 
bannered host of Summer unto the scattered and whistling 
disarray of Autumn. How many of those wonderful cam- 
paigns have I really seen ? — alas ! I know too well how many 
I have numbered. 

There was a rapture of flowing water that always I was 
promising myself I should one day explore to the full; and 
now I am to die without knowing it. There were days and 
weeks and months of the universe in all its glory bidding for 
my admiration; yet I saw nothing of it all. My baser senses 
solicited me beyond the cosmic marvels. I lost in hours of 
sleep, or foolish pleasure, or useless labor, spectacles of 
beauty which the world had been storing up for millions of 
ages — perhaps had not been able to produce before my brief 
day. I regret even the first years of life when the universe 
seemed only a pleasant garden to play in and the firmament 
a second roof for my father's house. Grown older but no 
wiser, I planned to watch the sky from dawn to sunset and, 
on another occasion, from sunset to dawn ; but my courage or 
patience failed me for even this poor enterprise. I was a 
beggar at a feast of incomparable riches, and something 
always detained me from putting forth my hand; or I left 
the table which the high gods had spread and went eating 
husks with swine. And now I am to die hungry, self-robbed 
of my share at the banquet of immortal beauty — can Chris- 
tian penitence find anything to equal the poignancy of such a 
regret? . . . 

Yet even as I write I am cheating myself in the old bank- 
rupt fashion, for the day outside my window is like a tremu- 
lous golden fire and the world overflows with a torrent of 
green life — life that runs down from the fervid heaven and 
suspires through the pregnant earth. It is the first of June, 
when Nature, like a goddess wild with the pangs of delivery, 
moves the whole earth with her travail, filling every bosom 
with the sweet and cruel pain of desire. Now she takes ac- 



IN PRAISE OF LIFE 129 

count of nothing that does not fecundate, conceive or pro- 
duce, intent only upon securing her own immortal life. And 
though she has done this a million and a million ages, yet is 
she as keen of zest as ever; as avid for the full sum of her 
desire as when she first felt the hunger of love and life; as 
unwearied as on the morning of Creation. 

"Put away your foolish task," she seems to say. "Yet a 
few days and it and you will both be ended and forgotten. 
Come out of doors and live while the chance is left you. 
Come and learn the secret of the vital sap that is no less a 
marvel in the tiniest plant than in the race of man. If you 
can not learn that, I will teach you something else of value — 
the better that you ask me naught. Leave your silly books 
and come into the great green out-of-doors, swept clean by 
the elemental airs. Here shall you find the answer to your 
foolish question, 'What do we live for?' — Life . . . 
life . . . life!" 




pulvis et Umbra. 




TO sadder message comes to a writer in the course 
of a year than the news of some friendly though 
unknown reader's death. Often you learn it 
only through the return of the magazine, with 
the single word "Deceased" written across the 
wrapper. It is a word to give one pause, however engrossing 
the present occupation. Here was a man or woman who, 
though personally unknown to you, was yet, it may be, in 
spiritual touch with oyu — perhaps the best friendship of all. 
For him or her you wrote your thoughts — since all writing is 
to an unseen but familiar audience ; for him or her you told 
the story of your own mind and heart, sure of a kindly under- 
standing and sympathy — without this assurance, believe me, 
there would be little enough writing in the world. Every 
writer's message is conditioned — I would almost say dictated 
— by this invisible but closely judging auditory. You get to 
know what your readers expect, and this in the main you try 
to give them, though often failing the mark. So the act of 
writing is a kind of tacit covenant and cooperation between 
the writer and his public. Indeed, it is not I but you who 
hold the pen ; or rather it is I who hold it but you who speak 
through it and through me. 

This relation being understood, it is but natural that a 
writer should feel a sense of grief and loss on hearing of the 
death of some one who held him to this communion of 
thought and spirit. I am not sure that this grief would be 
more genuine had he personally known the lost one — our 
finest friendships, like the old classic divinities, veil them- 
selves in a cloud. We wear ourselves out trying to maintain 
the common friendships of the house and street, and it is like 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 131 

matching faces with Proteus : in the end we become indiffer- 
ent — or wise. 

But here was one whom you never saw — who lived half 
the length of the continent from you, or perhaps in the next 
town — no matter, you two had never met in the body. Your 
word did, however, come to him and called forth a genial 
response ; he let you know that so far as you went he set foot 
with you. Thenceforward you marched the more boldly, 
getting grace and courage and authority from this one's silent 
friendship and approval. You figured him as one who stood 
afar off — too far for you to see his face — and waved you a 
cheery salute; your soul hailed a fellow pilgrim. Now comes 
the word that he can go no further with you — rather, indeed, 
that he has outstripped your laggard pace and gone forward 
on the great Journey. You learn of his departure in the 
chance way I have mentioned — not being a friend in the con- 
ventional sense, the family do not think to send you any 
message or mourning card. You have but to feel that you 
are poorer by a friendship of the soul than you were yester- 
day ; that you are going on, in a sense, alone and unsupported, 
for this friend was a host; that you are not to look ever 
again for his written word of praise, which brought such 
gladness to your heart, or his delicate counsel that often 
helped you to a clearer vision of things. The silent compact 
is dissolved. 

I set these lines here in loving and grateful memory of a 
few such friends of mine who died to this life during the past 
year. May they live on to higher purpose ! 



Life is a blessing, and death is no less. 
That which we call the common lot is the rarest lot. Love 
and loss and grief are for all. 

Of two men, one who loves and one who has loved and 



132 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

lost, the second is the richer: God has given him the better 
part — he holds both of earth and Heaven. 

The love that has known no loss is wholly selfish and 
human. Death alone sanctifies. 

Who has not lain down at night saying unto himself, 
"Now is the solemn hour when my own shall come back to 
me," — has not sounded the shoreless sea of love. 

I believe in life and I believe not less profoundly in death. 

I believe in a resurrection and a restoration — we can not 
lose our own. 

No man has ever yet found tongue to tell the things that 
death has taught him. No man dare reveal them fully — 'tis 
a covenant with Silence. 

A power that strikes us to our knees with infinite sorrow 
and a yearning that would reach beyond the grave, must be 
a Power Benign. 

Life divides and estranges: Death reunites and reconciles: 
Blessed be Death ! 



"Your friend is dead!" they told me, but I did not believe 
nor understand. 

Then they led me to a darkened room, hushed and solemn 
amid the roar of New York, where I saw him lying in a 
strange yet beautiful serenity. 

No disfigurement of his manly comeliness; no trace of a 
struggle that had convulsed the watchers with pain only less 
than his. 

Roses on his manly breast — roses rich and lush as the 
young life that had sunk into a sleep so sudden, so unlooked 
for. 

Nothing to shock, nothing to appal in this worldless 
greeting to the friends of his heart. As ever in life, his per- 
sonality took and held us in its strong toil of grace — yes, 
more than ever held us now closely his own. 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 133 

Could this indeed be death ? 

Ah, many a time had I hastened with joyous anticipation 
to meet him, but never had we kept a tryst like this. 

I clasped that hand whose touch so often had thrilled me 
with its kindness — oh, hand so strong and gentle of my best- 
loved friend ! It was not cold as I feared it would be, and 
surely a pulse answered to mine — he knew, oh, yes ! he knew 
that I was there. 

I kissed his calm forehead and felt no chill of death — no 
terror at the heart. He seemed but to lie in a breathless 
sleep that yet held a profound consciousness of our presence. 

Still they said he was dead, — he so tranquil, almost smiling 
and inscrutably attentive! — and the grief of women chal- 
lenged my own tears to flow. 

Yet, with my emotions tense as a bow drawn to the head, 
I could not weep ; so was I held by this wonder and majesty 
they called death. And it seemed that he did not ask my 
tears in the ineffable peace of our last meeting — no, not my 
tears. But there was a gathering up of the heart which I had 
never known before, a bringing together by Memory, the 
faithful warder, of all that had made or ministered to our 
friendship, — kind looks and tones, trifles light as air mingled 
with graver matters, a country walk, a sea voyage, books 
that we had read together, snatches of talk, mutual pleasures, 
mutual interests, a hundred proofs of brotherly affection and 
sympathy, — so Memory ran searching the years till the sum 
of my love and my loss lay before me. 

Did he know — did he feel ? Scarcely I dared to ask myself 
when the Silence breathed Yes! . . . 

Here at my elbow is the telephone into which I could 
summon his pleasant voice at will. It was but now we were 
talking and making happy plans together — I had no plans 
without him. 

Then there was a blank, and a strange voice, vibrant with 
pain, called me up and said . . . 



134 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

Oh God ! — It can not be true ! He a giant in his youth and 
strength; he with his vast enjoyment of life, every nerve and 
muscle of him trained to the fullest energy; he struck down 
without a note of warning in the vigor of his triumphant 
manhood, while the old, the sickly and the imperfect live on? 
— No, no — this were not death, but sacrifice. 

Why, it was but yesterday I felt the vital grasp of his 
hand; listened to his brave talk, so genial a reflex of his mind 
and spirit; basked in the brightness of his frank smile, — 
debtor as ever I was to his flowing kindness ; drank the cor- 
dial of his living presence, and took no thought of fate. 

And now they tell me he is dead — that from our account 
of life, this long sum of days and hours so dreary without 
him, he is gone forever ! Over and over must I say this, or 
hear the dull refrain from others ; yet the truth will not press 
home. 

For, in spite of the dread certainty, I am not always with- 
out hope of seeing him again in the pleasant ways of life 
where often we met together; where never we parted but 
with a joyous promise soon to meet again. 

This hope would be stronger, I now feel, had I not looked 
upon him in that strange peacefulness that was yet so com- 
pelling; and sometimes I wish they had not led me there. 

So hard is it to break with the dear habit of life — so reluc- 
tant the heart to believe that the silver cord has been loosed 
which bound it to another. 

Oh, my lost friend ! 

The watchers told me that they had never seen so brave a 
struggle for life. Time and again he grappled with the De- 
stroyer, like the strong athlete he was — yes, and often it 
seemed that his dauntless heart would prevail. But alas ! the 
fates willed otherwise. 

Then at last, when hope was gone, as he read in the tear- 
ful eyes of those about him, he threw up his right hand with 
a lamentable gesture, saying, — "That's all!" 



PULVIS ET UMBRA 



i3S 



Not all, brave and true heart, for love can not lose its own, 
and thy defeat was still a victory. Thou livest now more than 
ever in the memory of those who gave thee love for love, 
yet ever lacked of thy abounding measure; to them shalt 
thou ever appear as when thou didst fall asleep in the glory 
of thy youth and strength; age can not lay its cold hand upon 
thee, and thy beloved, dying old mayhap, shall again find 
thee young. 

In that sweet hope, dear Friend of my heart, and until 
then — farewell, farewell ! 





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Shadows. 

E are shadows all and shadows we pursue. This 
business of life which we make-believe to take 
so earnestly, — what is it but a moth-chase or the 
play of grotesques in a child's magic lantern? 
A sudden helter-skelter of light and shade, a 
comic jumble of figures thrown for a moment on the screen, 
and then — darkness ! 

Children of the shadow, to that Shadow we return at last; 
but the very essence of our life is fluid, evanishing always. 
The minute, the day, the hour, the year, — who can lay hands 
on them? — and yet in our humorous fashion we speak of 
these as fixed and stable things, subject to our control. Mean- 
time and all time, dream delivers us unto dream, while life 
lends to its most tangible aspects something shadowy and 
spectral, as the vapors clothe the horizon with mystery. The 
things we call realities, in our vain phrase, that enter most 
deeply into the warp of our lives, these are also dreamstuff, 
kindred of the Shadow. Our consciousness from which we 
dare to apprehend immortality, can only look backward into 
the realm of dream and shadow, or forward into the realm 
of shadow and dream. I am at this moment more stricken at 
the heart with the sorrow of a song that my mother crooned 
to me, a child, in the firelight many years ago, than with all 
the griefs I have since known. Shadows, all shadows ! With 
my house full of romping, laughing children, there falls now 
upon my heart the tiny shadow of a lost babe — and I beat 
helpless hands against the iron mystery of death. . . . 

But the living, too, are shadows, not less pitiable than they 
whom death has taken from our sight. Nay, it is more sad 



SHADOWS 137 

to be the shadow of a shadow than to clasp the final dark- 
ness. 

Tell me, oh dear love, where now is the face that once 
showed me all the heaven I cared to know, the form that 
made the rapture of my youth, the spell which filled my 
breast with delicious pain, the lips whose touch so coy, so 
rarely gained, was honey and myrrh and wine ? Oh, say not 
that she, too, is of the Shadow ! — 

Nay, she is here at thy side and has never left thee, but is 
in all things the same — look again ! Alas ! this is not the face 
that charmed my youth, this is not the form that filled my 
dreams — and her eyes were clear as the well-springs of Para- 
dise. But oh, for pity of it, let not my poor love know that 
her dear enrapturing self, with our precious dream in which 
we drew down heaven to earth, is gone forever into the 
Shadow. . . . 

We are shadows all, living ghosts, so slight of memory 
and consciousness that we seem to die many deaths ere the 
final one. This illusion we name life is intermittent — hardly 
can we recall what happened day before yesterday. Even the 
great events of life (as we phrase them) do but feebly stamp 
our weak consciousness. By a fiction which everyone knows 
to be false, we make a pretence of feeling much and deeply. 
'Tis a handsome compliment to our common nature, but the 
truth is we rarely feel — our substance is too thin and ghost- 
like. 

As shadows we fly each other and are never really in con- 
tact. This is the profound deception of love, the pathos of 
the human tragedy. The forms we would clasp make them- 
selves thin air; we strain at a vacuum and a shade — aye, in 
the most sacred embraces of love we hold — nothing. Less 
hard is it to scale the walls of heaven than to compass our 
desire. But now at last we are to be satisfied, to have our fill 
of this dear presence which spells for us the yearning and 



138 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

mystery of love: — in the very rapture of possession we feel 
the eternal cheat. 

Yet while we lament ever that we can not lay hands on 
those we love, shadows that we are, no more sure are we of 
ourselves. This shadow of me eludes even myself as I am 
eluded by the shadows of others in the great phantasmal 
show around me. I know this shadow of me, volatile, uncer- 
tain, ever escaping from under the hand, and if I were not so 
busy chasing my own shadow — the evanescent me — I should 
have more leisure for hunting other moths and shadows. 
The old Greeks figured this change and fugacity in the 
mythic Proteus; but they missed the deeper sense of it. 

There was a shadow of me last year that I had some cause 
of quarrel with and we parted unkindly. Where is it? — gone 
forever. Wiser now, I would gladly make peace with that 
shadow — it meant honestly, I must confess, though often it 
sinned and blundered — but never more will it walk the earth. 
Other shadows of me have likewise escaped, leaving similar 
accounts unsettled (they never do put their affairs in order) 
—not to be settled now, I dare say, until the Great Audit. 

I would not care to recall all those shadows of myself, 
even had I the power, as I would not wish to live my life 
over again, without leave to change it (He is a fool or a liar 
who says otherwise) . But I may confess a weakness for One 
that vanished long ago, leaving me too soon : a shadow of 
youthful hope and high purpose that could do much to re- 
fresh this jaded heart, dared I but look upon it. Oh, kind 
Master of the Show, grant me once more to see that shadow 
on the screen ! Unworthy as I am, let me look on it again and 
strive to gather new hope from its imperishable store. I 
know it dreamed of a holier love than I have realized; of 
nobler aims than I have had strength to reach; of crowns 
and triumphs that I shall never claim. It believed only in 
good (God knows!) and since it left me, without any cause 
that I can remember, I have known much evil. Yet it is still 



SHADOWS 



139 



the essential me, soul of my soul, and so must it be through 
the eternities. I can not be separated from that Brightness, 
that Innocency, that Hopefulness which once was I — call it 
back for but an instant to give peace to my soul ! 

Vain appeal ! — A shadow calling unto the Shadow. 



Sureum Corda. 




HERE is a brief Latin saying which holds in two 
words the best philosophy of the human race. 
It is, Sursum corda — lift up your hearts! 

Why despair of this world? All the joy you 
have ever known has been here. It is true there 
may be better beyond, but as Thoreau said, "One world at 
a time!" 

And now let us reason a little. Are you sure you have 
given the world a fair trial — or rather have you let it give 
you a fair trial? Softly now: the first words will not do to 
answer this question — remember it is not I who interrogate, 
but your fate. 

Can you expect anything but failure when you lie down 
and accept defeat in advance? Anything but sorrow when 
you set your house for mourning? Anything but rejection 
when you carry dismay in your face, telling all the world of 
your hope forlorn? 

I went to my friend asking cheerily and confidently for a 
thing that seemed hopeless: smiling and without a second 
thought, he gave me what I asked. Again I went to my 
friend asking humbly and with little heart of grace for a 
thing that I yet knew was hopeful: frowning he denied my 
prayer. With what brow thou askest shalt thou be answered. 

Lift up your hearts ! 

A word in your ear: Have you ever had a trouble or a 
sorrow that would for a moment weigh with the sure knowl- 
edge that you were to die next week, next month, next year ? 
Be honest now ! 

A little while ago I was very ill, and it seemed to me that 
if only I could get up from my bed, nothing ever would 



*w> 



SURSUM CORDA 141 

trouble me again. Well, in time I was able to get up, and 
then the old worries came sneaking back, one after another. 
Even as I write, they are grinning and mowing at my elbow, 
telling me that my work is futile. I know I am happy and 
well now, but they are always trying to persuade me to the 
contrary. I know that my hope was never so reasoned and 
strong, the future never so gravely alluring; but they will 
have it that I am an utter bankrupt in my hopes and the way 
onward closed to me. I know my friends — my real friends — ■ 
were never more true and fond and faithful than they are to- 
day — they whisper darkly of broken faith, evil suspicion and 
the treason of the soul. 

Out upon the liars ! It is I that am in fault to give them a 
moment's hearing. The broken faith, the treason, the dis- 
trust — if any such there be — are mine alone; for in my own 
breast were these serpents hatched and the poison I drink is 
of my own brewing. 

Lift up your hearts ! 

Hast thou no cause to be happy? — look well now. Thou 
wast sick and thou art now whole. Weary, thou didst lay 
down a beloved task, not hoping ever to take it up again : yet 
see ! it is in thy hands. Is not the wife of thy youth ever with 
thee, still fair and kind and blooming? Thou dreamest a 
haggard dream of poverty, while thy house is filled with the 
divine riches of love and ringing with the joyous mirth of 
thy children. The musicians of hope pipe to thee and thou 
wilt not dance; victory smiles on thee anear and thou wilt 
think only of defeat. Look! — it is but a little way and thou 
droopest with the long wished-for haven in sight. . . . 

Lift up your hearts ! 

Yesterday the aeolian harp was silent all day in the win- 
dow, not a fugitive air wooing it to music. To-day it is wild 
with melody from every wind of the world. So shall the 
brave music of thy hopes be renewed. 

Have no care of the silent, barren yesterdays — they are 



142 



PALMS OF PAPYRUS 



only good to carry away all your mistakes, all your maimed 
purposes, all your vain brooding, all your weak irresolution, 
all your cowardice. Concentrate on To-day and your soul 
shall be strong to meet To-morrow. Hope, Courage, En- 
ergy — an d You! — against whatever odds. . . . 
Lift up your hearts ! 



Seeing the Old Cown. 




'VE been back seeing the old town. The old town 
where I served the first years of my hard ap- 
prenticeship to life — alas! not yet completed. 
The old town where, as a boy, I dreamed those 
bright early dreams whose fading into gray fu- 
tility makes the dull burden of every man's regret. 

It may be that my dreams were more varied and fantastic 
than those of the average younker, for I was the fool o' fancy 
with a poet's wild heart in my breast. God knows what I 
promised myself in that long vanished time of youth which 
yet was instantly vivified and present to me as I trod the 
streets of the old town. I felt like one about to see a ghost — 
the ghost of my young self; and I shrank consciously from 
meeting it with this bitter-sweet pang of disillusion at my 
heart. I could not more sensibly have feared a living pres- 
ence. Alas, what one of us all is worthy, after the heavy 
account of years, to confront the ghost of his candid youth? 
— what one but must bow the head before that pitying yet 
reproachful Memory? 

This feeling took such strong hold upon me that soon I 
hastened away from the too-familiar squares and corners, so 
poignantly reminiscent of that other Me, and went to the 
hotel facing Main street. But even here, seated at a window 
and elbowed by a group of story-swapping drummers, I 
could not free myself from the spell of old memories. Youth 
with its hundred voices cried to me ; the past and the present 
became at once strangely confused yet separable; and I was 
set to the painful task of tracing and identifying my younger 
self in the crowd of passers-by. 

And I did find that boy again — oh yes ! I did find him in 



144 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

spite of the lapse of many changing years and all that Time 
has wrought within and without me since he and I were one. 
I found him, though he was long shy and hesitated to come 
out of the shadows ; holding back timidly and looking on me 
with tender yet doubtful eyes — ah God ! I knew whence the 
doubt. But at last he came fully, careless of the roaring 
drummers or knowing himself to be unseen; and I held his 
hand in mine, while a sweet sorrow beat against my heart in 
the thought of what might have been and now could never 
be. And after the kind relief of tears, we talked in whispers 
a long time there by the window, no one noticing us ; and ere 
he went back into the shadow he touched my forehead lightly 
with his lips, leaving me as one whom God has assoiled. . . . 

The old town was but little changed, only it seemed 
smaller, like all places we have known in our youth and been 
long absent from. The Main street, where the working boys 
and girls flirt and promenade in an endless chain, still 
slouched the whole length of the town, with the railroad be- 
tween it and the river; no different except that it was better 
paved than in my time, and the clanging trolleys ran instead 
of the ancient bob-tailed horse-cars. There were a few new 
shops or strange names over the old ones — no other changes 
of consequence. The same old town ! — the boy of twenty 
years ago would not have been phased in the least. 

But I was, and the fact was due to the changes which Time 
had written upon so many faces I had known; fair young 
girls turned into full-blown matrons, vaunting their offspring 
with no lack of words, or withered old maids looking ask- 
ance and shrinking from recognition ; striplings who had 
shot up into solid manhood, and whom you were puzzled to 
place; broken old men whom you recalled in their vigorous 
prime ; all the varied human derelicts of the storm and stress 
of twenty years. Oh, it makes a man think to look things 
over every five years or so in the old town. 

Certainly, if you wish to get a true line on yourself, go 



SEEING THE OLD TOWN 145 

back to the old town. Nothing else will do the trick. Your 
glass is a liar leagued with your vanity. Your wife a loving 
flatterer who says the thing that is not. Your children will 
never tell you how old you are beginning to look. Your daily 
intimates and coevals are concerned to keep up the same illu- 
sion for themselves. You deceive yourself, know it and are 
happy in the deception. There is only one way for you to 
learn the "bitter, wholesome truth," or, in other words, to 
get a fair look at the clock — go back to the old town ! 

There is some humor, too, in going back, as I find from 
my visits at an interval of five or six years. Always I am most 
heartily and noisily greeted by men who have no use for me 
except to "knock" me, whom the sight or sound of my name 
exasperates, to whom my tiny bit of success is poison, and 
who struggle on bravely with the hope of seeing me finally 
land where I deserve to be and am, as they fervently believe, 
irretrievably headed. We do each other good, for if I were 
to die, these men would lose one of the sweetest motives of 
their existence; and I, knowing this, am eager to live on and 
disappoint them. 

Last time I went back I saw one of those friendly fellows 
at a distance of a block, and he kept his glad hand out at the 
risk of paralysis, until we came together. Then how he 
laughed with pleasure and what a grip he gave me ! I had to 
laugh with him and return his grip, so far as my feeble 
strength would allow. In an acquaintance of over twenty 
years this fellow had never offered me the slightest proof of 
his friendship, save, as I have said, to "knock" me; and now 
a dear friend of mine hung modestly back while he crushed 
me in his iron embrace. When I was going away at the end 
of my visit, this terrible enemy came to the nine o'clock train 
to see me off and spoiled the leave-taking of my real friends. 
There is irony of the same brand elsewhere, but you will not 
see it to such naked advantage as in the old town. . . . 

The saddest experience one can have in revisiting the old 



i 4 6 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

town is to hear suddenly of the death of some friend of one's 
youth, who though separated from one by long years of 
absence, must ever share in the romance of that enchanted 
period. I was so to learn of the loss of a friend who had 
been very dear to me in the old days. Together we had 
trudged the Main street of the old town, by night and by 
day, making plans for the future, few of which were realized 
either for him or for me. 

The friendships of youth are sacred. Mature life has noth- 
ing to offer in their place. Men agree to like each other for 
social or business reasons; often because they fear each 
other. The heart is not touched in this hollow alliance — it is 
a pact of interest and selfishness. Youth and trust, age and 
cynicism — thus are they paired. 

I know well that one or two young friendships or frank 
elections of the heart have yielded me much of the pain and 
thrill and rapture of that sentiment between the sexes which 
we call love. I know that I was several years older ere the 
voice of a girl had leave to thrill me like the tone of this dear 
lost friend; that I suffered as keenly during an occasional 
boyish miff with him as in my first genuine love quarrels; 
that I would have risked life and limb to please him, and 
could conceive of nothing sweeter than his praise; that I can 
not think of him even now without a pain at the heart which 
I have not the skill to analyze. And though I saw little of 
him for many years and there was no attempt to follow up 
our ancient friendship — our paths lying wide apart in every 
sense — and though he died a man of middle age, I can but 
think of him, — taking no note at all of the years that lie 
between, — as a bright-haired, laughing youth; and so mourn 
him with a sorrow of the heart which proves a silent witness 
there during all the years to the truth of our early affection. 

There is somthing divine, though we but dimly glimpse it, 
in theunavowed, almost unconscious persistenceof these sacred 
ties of our youth, these precious legacies from the days that 



SEEING THE OLD TOWN 



H7 



are no more, whose light shines with a white lustre that be- 
longs to them alone. 

Sleep well, my friend! 

I was not sorry to have seen the old town again, though it 
gave me but a sad pleasure at best and I was glad when my 
short leave was up. And yet that singular thrill of walking 
where once you knew and were known of everybody, and 
where still, because of some slight rumors from the great 
outlying world, a quenchless village curiosity attends you, is 
worth going a long journey to feel. 

To say nothing of your joyous enemy who hails you with 
stentorian shout and glad hand extended, on your arrival, and 
likewise dismisses you on your departure with curses not loud 
but deep. And the many things you see and hear and feel 
which, without compliment, certify you to yourself as you 
are! 




H ftearty God. 

^ET us believe in George Meredith's "God of 
hearty humor." He would, I am sure, be very 
different from the Jewish God, that terrible 
Being who was never known to smile, and in 
whose awful shadow the children of men have 
mourned and done penance during weary ages. We should 
turn away from that lurid history in which there is no inno- 
cent mirth, whose triumphs are often stained with the blood 
of the guiltless and from whose pages men have wrested a 
warrant for their blackest crimes. We should forget it ut- 
terly—its blighting and cursing, its groveling worship, its 
denial of humanity in the name of a self-styled God of 
Mercy, its craven prostration before the jealous Egotist of 
the heavens. 

Our God of hearty humor is one who would not lie in 
wait, nursing His malice against us poor human mites, spy- 
ing upon us constantly, and rejoicing in His enormous power 
of mischief. Who would not punish the children for the sins 
of the fathers. Who would not play favorites and set one 
race to destroy another. Who would not have an insatiable 
appetite for foolish incense and mumbled praise. Who would 
not be a mean God for mean people, preferring those made 
in His own image and likeness. Who would hate to see the 
spiritual distortions that are now practised before the Other, 
in the name of religion. Who would have nothing to do with 
an Atonement of cruelty and blood. Who would be a kind 
human God for human beings and not a mythical monster 
belonging to a remote age of nightmare and darkness. Who 
would get tired sometimes of His majesty up there and come 
down and visit with us. Having His laugh with us — ah, then 



A HEARTY GOD 149 

to be witty would no longer be sinful and sanctified dulness 
would lose its crown. Shouldn't we enjoy the humor of God, 
especially the immense joke that we quite mistook His char- 
acter during ages and ages? — stupendous hoax! Hearing 
our complaints with kind indulgence and disproving that old 
libel that one may not see God and live. Being, in short, a 
hearty God whom a plain man could talk to without the help 
of bell, book or candle, and who would care for us, His little 
ones, as tenderly as we care for our own. What a re-writing 
there would be of the legend of God ! What a discrediting of 
the old fables ! What a tearing down of the old hideous 
idols before which the world has prostrated itself for a thou- 
sand and a thousand years ! — for there should be no lifeless 
images to the Living God. What an abandonment of the 
churches ! — for this God would meet us naturally anywhere, 
at home or abroad in the fields. What a wiping out of the 
creeds ! — knowing Him face to face, we should not have to 
set down our belief in a book, lest we forget it over night. 
What a wholesale dismissal of His self-appointed agents and 
intermediaries ! — no one should stand between this God and 
the humblest of his children. What a new heaven, what a new 
earth in the sure presence of a kind, hearty God, who would 
manifest Himself equally to all His people ! . . 

Perhaps it is not so hard to believe that such a God is with 
us even now . . . if we will only stop thinking of the 
Other! 



Che Better Day. 




OMETIMES I see as in a vision a fairer and bet- 
ter world than this in which man is still the 
prey of man and the race still travails under the 
primal curse. A fairer and better world and yet 
the same. 
The same green plains and rolling rivers, the same ban- 
nered forests and flower-decked meadows, the same happy 
orchards and smiling fields, the same succession of seed-time 
and harvest, the same processional of the seasons, with the 
blue sky over all. 

But not the same faces and forms of men and women 
and children — not the same their life in the thronged cities 
where labor, wolf-like, feeds on labor, poverty devours pov- 
erty, and the many toil hopelessly for the few — not the same 
in the meagre villages where the strong man pines in his 
unfruitful strength and old age is a mendicant, nor in the 
wide country, rich with corn and wheat, whose wealth is not 
for the tillers : — not the same wherever human destiny is cast. 
I look, and lo ! I see beautiful and ordered cities occupying 
larger spaces, with homes of comfort and beauty for all the 
dwellers therein. I mark no divisions of rich and poor, of 
proud and humble, of vicious and virtuous, of law-abiding 
and disorderly. I see no gallows for the felon, no jail for the 
criminal, no court for crime, no brothel for the prostitute, 
no workhouse for poverty, no hospital for disease — none of 
all the nameless refuges into which society casts the rejected, 
the fallen and the despised. 

Instead of these terrible and familiar things, I see health 
universal as the air, virtue that needs no policeman, honesty 
that goes unwatched and unsuspect, content and competency 



THE BETTER DAY 151 

for all. I see many and noble schools, some in spacious build- 
ings, others in the open parks and pleasure places, the teach- 
ers mingling freely with the eager, happy children; and I 
note with joy that there is an end of the old instruction of 
constraint and fear. 

I see with greater joy and thankfulness that among all 
these children of the Better Day there is no defect of mind, 
no deformity of body; that they were conceived and begot- 
ten in the love that can not libel itself. And I rejoice that 
there should be an end of that old blasphemy declaring the 
idiot, the halt and the blind, the wen, the hare-lip and the 
ulcer to have been made in the image of God. 

I see churches of a more liberal and humane religion, 
temples of a higher art, theatres of a nobler drama, orpheons 
of a grander music, recreations of a better and more elevat- 
ing kind, open to all the people. I am stricken with wonder 
at the demeanor of these worthy citizens, at their sage and 
just observations, their unerring sense of artistic beauty and 
fitness, the culture and largeness of view, common to all, 
which accompany their better lot. 

I see on every hand unhurried, skillful industry that seems 
to me superior to much of the so-called art of our own day. 
I mark the fine proportions of the private dwellings, the 
heroic symmetry of the public structures, the true harmony 
in which all are coordinated. I see carpenters and house- 
smiths working with the dignity of sculptors, mechanics 
proud of their artizanry, a new honor in all the trades. I see 
labor unforced, erect, independent everywhere. I hear no 
brutal commands, I see no servile or sullen obedience. I per- 
ceive only the will of free men in voluntary action, delighting 
to serve and adorn the city of their homes. And in all these 
grand cities I see no pampered idleness, no uesless hands, no 
listless slaves of luxury, no swollen drones absorbing the 
riches of the hive, no parasites whose ease is purchased by 



152 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

the blood and sweat of thousands. But I see that there is la- 
bor and leisure enough for all. 

Now looking to the country, I see as it were a vast and 
variegated garden made up of multitudes of smiling farms, 
with every acre yielding its due produce, every rood under 
tillage, and labor here as in the cities, content, calm and 
self-sustaining. I see that at last the city and the country 
live for, not to prey upon or devour, each other. I look 
upon such a population as the world has never seen, filling 
the earth with joy and mirth, with love and useful labor, 
with the blessings of peace, the trophies of art, the achieve- 
ments of industry. I see no idle, menacing armies, no hosts 
of men withdrawn from the pursuits of peace, no cannoneers 
waiting with match and fuse, no quarrel broached on sea or 
land, no priests arrayed to bless and sanction slaughter, no 
sword unsheathed, no whip upraised, no cowering tortured 
form, no people bowed beneath oppression, no despot defiant 
of justice — nothing to mar the universal brotherhood under 
the smile of God ! . . . 

Oh, call it not a foolish vision, crudely as I have here 
sought to put it into words, — for it has been the consoling 
dream of the noblest souls that have ever worn the vesture 
of humanity. It was this which inspired the martyrs of free- 
dom, and filled with light the dungeons of the brave ; this 
which robbed the rack of pain, took away the sting of the 
most cruel death, and welcomed the stern trial of the fire. Be 
it ours to pray for it, to watch for it, to struggle for it with 
patient loyalty, to bring up our children in the holy faith of 
it, to consecrate and dedicate to it the best purpose of our 
lives. 

So shall those who come after bless us in the light of that 
Better Day, paying to our dust the homage of their praise 
and tears; lamenting that we can not share in the glorious 
fruition. So shall we be sure that we have not lived in vain! 



H JModcrn Rercsy. 




N THE beginning we are told the good God or- 
dained that some of His human children should 
play and more of them should labor. So it has 
continued to this day, to the entire satisfaction 
of the playing children. 
These latter were never so numerous in the world as they 
are in the present year of grace. They were never so rich 
and they never had so many beautiful and ingenious play- 
things — the world is literally a doll's house to them. It is for 
them to sing : 

The world is so full of all manner of things, 
I think we should all be as happy as kings. 

I say they were never so numerous, because the labor of 
the children who toil is ever creating new wealth, the ma- 
terial of pleasure, and this increases the number of the chil- 
dren who play. Mark you, without really diminishing the 
great host of working children. 

Of course, these are often discontented with their lot, and 
sometimes they even threaten to knock off work entirely and 
go in for play themselves. But it never quite comes to this, 
for law and authority, the forces of organized society, are 
always on the side of the playing children. And when the 
laboring children actually leave the work-bench, the forge, 
the mine, the factory, proposing foolishly to themselves to 
imitate their betters, then the thing is called a Strike, the sol- 
diers are brought out to terrify the unwilling workers, often 
many of these are killed in the violence that is sure to follow, 
and presently all is again as before: the laboring children la- 



154 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

bor and the playing children play. If a strike were to last 
very long, — that is, long enough to inconvenience the playing 
children, — then it would be called Anarchy and there would 
surely be War. But that dreadful thing has seldom hap- 
pened, and so the playing children have small fear of it. 

It is very hard to break down an ordinance of the good 
God. And yet this one regulating the division of labor and 
play, has stood so long, not perhaps so much through the will 
of the playing children and those in authority, as through 
the patient submission of the working children themselves, 
who for the most part love and believe in God, and especially 
believe that the Son of God while upon this earth was like 
unto themselves. So they have been patient, very patient, 
and I think will be so to the very end — the end that shall 
give them at last their due portion of play. 

Yes, there were never so many playing children and never 
so much play in the world. And it really is a beautiful world 
to play in, if only one had the time for it, and the money! 
But money and time, the two chief requisites of play, can 
not be for any man, except through the labor of others. 
Herein is seen the wisdom of the good God — without the 
children who labor there would be no children who play! 

To be sure, there are certain men called Anarchists and 
Socialists by those in authority, who propose that all shall 
labor and all shall play, on equal terms. In other words, that 
there shall be no longer a distinct division of the children 
who labor and the children who play. But this plan is re- 
garded by the churches as an impiety — there is no warrant 
for it in the Bible, they say, and it clearly was not the in- 
tention of the good God. Has He not always played favor- 
ites, according to the Book which is called His Word; set- 
ting some of His children to rob and slaughter others, equal- 
ly His children ; wiping out the guiltless and taking their in- 
heritance; filling whole regions of the earth with needless 
suffering, and blood, and tears? It is true the meaning of the 



A MODERN HERESY 155 

Holy Book seems often obscure in the light of common 
sense and has to be interpreted by an Authority which prac- 
tically stopped guessing about it over a thousand years ago ! 

In the past the efforts of men to understand the Bible dif- 
ferently from the teachings of Authority, often led to bloody 
wars. But if you will hearken to the churches, there has 
never been a heresy so dangerous to Sacred Truth or one 
that carried so formidable a menace to the divinely appoint- 
ed system of things, as this of the men called Socialists and 
Anarchists — namely, that the human race, all children of 
God, should not be divided into two groups, enormously 
unequal, of those that labor and those that play. Many of 
the playing children are at bitter odds as to the meaning of 
the Bible in various texts and places — nay, to a considerable 
number of them the Holy Book seems a very dull joke and 
their lives are often a mockery of its precepts. But on the 
point that they and their kind shall be suffered to play for- 
ever, they are all in perfect accord and as one mind. The 
forces of law and authority are on the same side and also 
the weight of that immense legacy of traditional ignorance, 
superstition, brutality and injustice which is misnamed civil- 
ization. 

So it is bound to take a long time, a very long time yet ; but 
I believe the Plan will be tried one day. And if it shall suc- 
ceed (which I believe also) then the good God will be wor- 
shipped in this beautiful world of His as He never was 
through the cruel ages when He turned one face to the chil- 
dren of labor and another to the children of play. 



familiar philosophy. 



fiopt. 




AST ever been in Hell, dear child of God ? Hast 
fallen down — down — down to those ray less 
depths where thou couldst no longer feel the sup- 
porting hand of God and where thou didst seem 
to taste the agony of the last abandonment? 
Hast known that terrible remorse wherein the soul executes 
judgment on herself — true image it may be of the Last 
Judgment — that night of the spirit whence hope and blessed- 
ness seem to have utterly departed? Hast known all this, 
dear child of God, not once but many times? — nay, livest 
thou in a constant dread expectation of knowing this again 
and again, so long as thy soul liveth? Then, be of good 
hope, for thou art indeed a Child of God ! 

There be many ways of winning Heaven, dear heart, but 
this is of the surest — to know and feel Hell in this world. 
And the more terribly thou comest to realize in thy spirit 
the horror and desolation of Hell here, the better approved 
is thy heirship in the Kingdom. For when thy feet take 
hold on Hell, then of a truth thy hope is high as Heaven. 

This too, forget not, is the trial and test of all fine souls 
— saints of God, martyrs of humanity, the great mystics 
and dreamers, the chosen of our race, whose names partake 
of the eternal life and glory of the stars. Wouldst thou 
be of a better company? All these great and victorious souls 
had known Hell to its uttermost depths, had tasted its most 
bitter anguish, had suffered its most fearful agonies, had 
drunk the cup of its awful despair, and had cried out under 
the burthen of doom, like Him on the Cross, that their God 



FAMILIAR PHILOSOPHY 



i57 



had forsaken them. Yet all were sons of God and proved 
their titles by conquering Hell in this world. 

Even as they fought the good fight and prevailed, so shalt 
thou, brave heart. Be glad and rejoice that thou art called 
upon to endure the same great trial, as being worthy of their 
fellowship. Thy deep-dwelling sorrows, thine agonies of 
spirit, — -nay, thy wrestling with Powers of Darkness and all 
the supra-mortal venture of thy soul which thou deemest 
laid upon thee as a curse, — do but seal and stamp thee God's 
darling. For none can reach the heights who has not known 
the depths, and though the Kingdom of Heaven be not of 
this world, most surely is the Kingdom of Hell. 

Courage, dear child of God ! 

c^* ti?* ^* 

Low. 






OVE is for the loving. 

There is but one well in the world that grows 
ever the richer and sweeter and more plenteous 
by giving. 

That well is the human heart and its living 
waters are those of love. 

Yet herein is the wonder of it, that the man who thinks 
he hath need of it but seldom shall not at his desire get more 
than a scanty draught, and the sweet water will turn bitter in 
his mouth. 

Ye have heard it said, to him that hath shall be given : this 
is the meaning thereof. 

Spend yourself in loving that you may be often athirst 
for the life-giving water. But count not to drink unto re- 
freshing unless you come weary and blessed from the service 
of love. Then, ah then, the sweetness of the draught ! . . . 
Love is for the loving. 



158 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

I spake some harsh words to my dear love, thinking my- 
self in the right and forgetting the Law of Kindness. Then, 
as I was turning away in anger, the sight of her pale face, 
with its mute reproach, smote me to the heart. I took her 
in my arms and we wept the most precious tears together. 
O divine moment, in that sacred hush, with her heart beat- 
ing against mine, I seemed to be conscious of angels listening. 



Sympathy ! Sympathy ! More and more I tell myself this is 
the master word. 

We are constantly seeking our own in darkness and light, 
awake or adream ; reaching out our longing arms toward the 
Infinite; sending forth our filaments of thought; summoning 
the One who shall know and feel, with a passion of desire; 
praying for that rare response which crowns the chief ex- 
pectancy of life. Not always do our arms fall empty; not al- 
ways do our thoughts return to mock our vain quest; not 
always are our prayers unanswered and our hearts left void 
and cold. 

I hold this to be of the true divinity of life, this kinship of 
the spirit which will leave no man or woman at rest but ever 
insists upon working out its exigent yet benign destiny, form- 
ing those sweet and consoling relations which are our best 
joy here and may be our eternal satisfaction. 

For the expectancy of love and sympathy, — that is to say, 
understanding — is one that never dies in the human heart. I 
may be sad, or dull, or cold, or out of touch with reality; I 
may persuade myself that there is no longer any pith in my 
mystery, that the years have left me bankrupt in the essen- 
tial stuff of life; that there is no remaining use for me under 
the sun. But let my heart be apprised, in the faintest whis- 
per, of the advent or imminence of a new friend, and lo ! the 
world is fresh-made, the heavens constellated with hope and 
joy and wonder as on the first day. 



FAMILIAR PHILOSOPHY 159 

Life is truly measured only by such love or expectancy; 
when that fails it is the same story for king and beggar. 

Love is the summoner, love is the seeker, love the expec- 
tancy and love the fulfilment. Blessed be Love ! 

I have said that we can not lose our own and are always 
seeking them by various means. Let me cite a familiar in- 
stance which many readers will easily parallel from their 
own experience. But it is the familiar instance that really 
proves. 

A year or so ago I was deeply moved by the wretched fate 
of a man of genius whom I had loved for his mind and ad- 
mired for his art and pitied for his terrible misfortunes. I 
said my say on the matter, with sincerity at least, and those 
words of mine brought me precious letters of praise and sym- 
pathy from unknown friends in foreign lands, who had also 
been friends of the fallen man of genius. Then, some time 
afterward, I read in an American journal a letter on the same 
subject by a man whose name was unknown to me, but whose 
quickened expression of my own feelings — pity for the dead, 
thanks for his rare gifts of which art has the immortal usu- 
fruct, charity for his errors and scorn for the Pharisaic spirit 
that exulted in an orgy of reprobation over the obscure 
grave where he had at last found peace and a safe refuge 
from the hunters — called the tears to my eyes and the blood 
to my heart. I tried to learn the writer's address in order to 
thank him for the emotion he had given me, but failed for 
reasons which I need not explain. Months passed away, 
during which I thought of the writer often, with a certain 
motiveless feeling, too, that I could afford to wait; and then 
one day there fluttered into my hand a letter from him ! Just 
such a letter as I should have expected from one whose mind 
and heart were an open book to me ; artless and cordial, as a 
man should write to his friend. He, too, had been seeking 
me, having somehow learned of the strong tie of sympathy 



160 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

between us ; and the thing harassed him, as he frankly con- 
fessed, until he had found me. 

Oh, I do not claim that there is anything extraordinary in 
this little coincidence, for I am not a believer in the extra- 
ordinary — the ordinary keeping my curiosity and sense of 
wonder fully occupied. But surely it establishes something 
for the kinship of sympathy and the intuitive mutual quest of 
related spirits. 

My prayer to the Infinite is that I may be suffered to go on 
to the end, seeking . . . seeking. For I say again, 
Love is the summoner, Love is the seeker, Love the expec- 
tancy and Love the fulfilment. Blessed be Love ! 



Yes, dear, do you go on sending me those sweet messages 
full of praise, and hope, and inspiration, holding always be- 
fore me the Ideal, keeping me to the plane of my better self. 
I may not feel that I deserve a tenth part of your faith in 
me — no matter, some day I may be worthy of your praise. 
And even though I should never reach the summit of your ap- 
preciation, still the glory will be yours of having urged me to 
the endeavor. You are the height and I am the depth ; you 
are the star shining in the Infinite and I the poor vainly as- 
piring worm on the earth below : yet in some fortunate hour 
I may be lifted to you. 

For we do not make the supreme effort of our souls for 
the many, but for the few, — nay, oftenest of all, for the 
One ! When I am at my best, you know well that I am writ- 
ing for you alone ; when I am at my worst, it is because I 
can not rise to the thought of you. Even so my soul is often 
silent for days, giving me no message from the Infinite, no 
hint of its kinship to the stars, no whisper of the life it led 
before this life and the life it shall lead after this. I some- 
times think you are my soul ! 

But help me — help me always, no matter how often and 



FAMILIAR PHILOSOPHY 161 

how far I may fall below your hope of me. Still reach me 
your kind hand which has power to save me from the last 
gulf; still say those words of grace and cheer for which I 
hunger the more, the more that I feel my unworthiness. I 
will read them over and over until I make myself believe 
that I really deserve them. Some day, be sure, I will utterly 
free myself from my baser self and live only for you. I will 
be your Sir Galahad and my strength of soul shall be as the 
strength of ten. I will dedicate every thought to you and I 
will write for you alone — then must I at last be worthy of 
your praise in which the few or the many will have no part. 
I will no longer give out my truth to hire, or shame the Di- 
vinity in my breast, or care only to move the laughter of the 
crowd. I will write a book only for you, and you shall be 
here, as now, looking over my shoulder as I write, and giving 
me fresh inspiration whenever my thought fails. Neither 
the few nor the many shall see this book — it will be for you 
and me alone. We shall love it greatly for having written it 
together and because it will be forever sacred to us two. I 
have already thought of a title for this book — we shall call 
it the "Story of a Man who Lost but afterward Found his 
Soul." 

Turn now your dear face to the light— for my lamp wanes 
and I have sat far into the night- — that I may see the look 
of praise upon it that has cheered so many a task of mine; 
that I may renew my worn spirit in the eternal peace of those 
calm eyes. 

Tell me, — oh, tell me the truth, I beseech you, — are you 
my soul! 



Love is akin to hate — how trite that is and how true! I 
sometimes wonder is either quality to be found unmixed with 
the other? Can we have love without hate or hate without 
love? The only glimpse of hatred I have ever had that quite 



1 62 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

appalled me was from one who loved me very much. Ah, 
happy they who neither love nor hate ! 



In love we must bleed and the wounds we receive are very 
cruel. Still it seems we can never have enough of them, for 
love has power to heal the wounds which it inflicts — and so 
we go on loving and bleeding to the end. 



There is one thing of which I have never had my fill and 
for which my soul hungers always — love ! And always I am 
promising to myself that some day I shall be satisfied. 



When I was younger there was nothing for me but a wo- 
man between the heavens and the earth. Now I perceive 
there are a few other things. Yet I am not old, as age is 
counted. 



The only man who has a right to despair of the world is 
he who neither loves nor is loved. 



There is but one thing more interesting than a woman's 
love — her hate. 



Love is a combat and friendship a duel. Strife is the law 
of existence. 



I should never be weary learning of women. I have long 
since tired learning of men. 



Look back now over the long way and see if it be not 
Love that has led you so far ! 



Love is the one dream that does not forsake us as we de- 
scend into the Valley, but is potent to bring joy or misery 
to the last. 



FAMILIAR PHILOSOPHY 



163 



Woman is the weaker animal, but she wins every battle 
with man — even when he thinks himself the victor. 



To find the One who could love and feel and understand 
— this is the dream of some who yet remain faithful to their 
bonds. 



What is more terrible than the face of one who once loved 
and now hates you, seen in a dream ! 




epigrams and Hphorieme. 




^|HE wise gods when they contrived this tragic 
comedy of life which we have been such a weary 
time a-playing, mixed up a little humor with the 
serious business. He alone plays his part well 
who finds the jest — the lath for the sword, the 
mask of Harlequin for the frozen face of Medusa. Those 
who have best solved the exquisite humor of the gods are 
called great by the generalvoice of mankind, and some dozen 
of them have lived since the world, or the play, began. Unlike 
these supremely gifted players, the vast majority of men get 
only the merest inkling of the gods' merry intent, but it suf- 
fices to save their lives from utter misery. Some devote them- 
selves to solving the riddle with terrible seriousness, and the 
laughing god underneath always escapes them, leaving them 
empty-handed and ever the more tragically serious. These — 
and they are no small number — die in madhouses or religion, 
or write books which increase the sorrow of the world : what- 
ever their fate, life remains for them a tragedy to the end. 



There came a Soul before the Judgment seat. And God 
said: Need there is none that We judge this man, for he 
hath given all his days to Evil ; from his childhood he hath 
turned his back upon the City of Peace and none hath ever 
cleaved more to the sweetness of sin. Let him pronounce his 
own judgment and avow that he hath deserved the Evil 
Place. 

Then the Soul cried out : It is true I have merited Hell by 
my iniquity, but this is not thy justice. 

And God said: What more canst thou ask, seeing that 
thou hast wrought judgment against thyself? 



EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 165 

Then the Soul made answer : Send me to Heaven for the 
good I would have done ! 

Laugh at Death and the chances are that he will give you 
a meaning salute and pass by. Get into a panic and chase 
after Dr. Cure-all— you will presently have a surer physician 
on your trail. When the Fear is really at hand,— as once 
occurred to me, when though I called to it, it went away — 
you will learn that it is no fear at all. For it is much easier 
to die than to live, and at the last Nature helps us to play our 
part. Indeed I believe few of us know what true courage 
is until we come to die, though we talk of it so loosely. 

The fear of death is largely a growth of superstition, and 
it has especially been fostered by the Christian faith, with its 
terribly uncertain award in the Hereafter. To the ancients 
it was utterly unknown in this dreadful aspect, and it was 
indeed accepted with a natural firmness and resignation which 
"makes cowards of us all." But the last thing to be said is, 
that our modern fear of death is as foolish as futile and 
makes a mock of itself. For why cling so desperately to this 
uneasy life which you are yet ever wishing an end of, by dis- 
content with the present or idle anticipation of the future . 
Do you remember when it was thrust upon you?— I doubt 
that you will be more conscious when it is at last taken away. 

Some one has defined genius as "inspired common sense." 
I would beg to amend this by dropping "common, for a 
genius may have inspired sense at any age, but common 
sense does not come to him much before he is thirty- 
five For about the seventh lustrum a man begins 
to see the true value of life and to hold a serious ac- 
counting with himself. The spendthrift desires and ardors of 
passion are past-the riot and the rapture of mere physica 
enjoyment gone by. Henceforth a man is no longer the fool 
of his senses-unless he be a fool from his mother s womb. 



1 66 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

The universe has steadied itself in his gaze; men cease to 
appear unto him as "trees walking;" the eternal questions, 
Wherefore? Whither? recur with a persistence that will 
not be laid to sleep. 

Now does the man begin to set his affairs in order and to 
take stock of his life-experience. What have the years 
brought him or taken away? — the gravity of this thought 
strikes him with a novel force. He finds, in truth, that he is 
poorer than he believed; that the mountains which once 
seemed to melt before the daring of his spirit are still there 
and now, alas! impassably high; that he is less in knowledge 
and will and power than he had assured himself; that time 
has stripped him of not a few illusions which once seemed to 
him the very stuff of life. 



While the fit lasts I take my opinions very seriously and 
labor hard to pass them on to others; not, if I know myself, 
as a matter of vanity, but simply that other persons may be 
benefited by partaking of the immense wisdom and knowl- 
edge which I do not care to monopolize. I am even eager to 
do battle for my opinions, and make myself quite wretched 
should they fail of a candid hearing. And it is likely enough 
that in my fiery, foolish zeal I may unwittingly cause pain to 
some tender hearts — for which I now and at all times ask 
forgiveness. But presently the wind shifts 'round to another 
corner of the compass, and I am a sane, good-humored man 
again, laughing cheerfully at my own and others' opinions. 

Most of us inherit our opinions. I inherited mine, and they 
were of the sort that are branded into the soul by old, un- 
happy, far-off memories of persecution endured for their 
sake; committed as a sacred heritage of race and blood; con- 
firmed by voices that plead the more potently across the 
silence of death; and finally stamped by a course of training 
that picked them out in letters of fire. 

Well, I carried these opinions for the better part of my 



EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 167 

life, the joyous and hopeful part, and then I threw them 
aw ay— perhaps to my loss and sorrow, for in these matters 
mv heart is often a rebel against my head. 



Cultivate joy in your life and in your work. For indeed 
when you think of it, over-seriousness is the bane of art as 
of life. Nothing in art was ever done well that was not a 
joy in its conception. Travail the artist must, but in gladness. 
So of the perfect lyrist, we read that his song is a rapture 
poured forth from a heart that can never grow old. 

Alexander Dumas, the greatest master of narrative fiction 
that has ever lived, toiled all day and every day, laughing 
like Gargantua at the birth of his son ; and sometimes weep- 
ing, too, over his own pathos. Ah, what would one not have 
given for the privilege of climbing the stairs stealthily to 
watch the merry giant at his task! Do you wonder that this 
rejoicing faculty furnished for many years the chief entertain- 
ment of Europe? I should not care much for a writer in- 
capable of being moved as Dumas was moved. 

Posterity is the hectic dream of the weak— it does not dis- 
turb the calm slumber of the strong. The man who works 
with his whole soul in the present, who possesses and is pos- 
sessed by the time that has been allotted him out of all eter- 
nity—that man may miss the prize as well as another. But 
he is headed the right way to capture the award of posterity. 

Shakespeare erred in assigning only seven ages to man- 
there are at least seventy. Often we live through several in 
a single day— it all depends upon the kind of experience. 

Who has not written it over and over again and then torn 
it up in despair and still renewed the effort with prayers and 
tears— he knows you not, ye Heavenly Powers! 



1 68 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

Remember that the true struggle of life is not to achieve 
what the world calls success, but to hold that Essential Self 
inviolate which was given you to mark your identity from all 
other souls. Against this precious possession — this Veriest 
You — all winds blow, all storms rage, all malign powers 
contend. As you hold to this or suffer it to be marred or 
taken from you, so shall be your victory or defeat. 



O Memory ! thou leadest me back over the years and show- 
est me many a place where once I would have lingered for- 
ever, but now thou canst not show me one of all where I 
would tarry again ; my Soul knoweth that not a single step 
can be retraced and that she is of the Infinite to be. 



Why do we write for the world the things we would not 
say to the individual? Why do we send on every wandering 
wind the secrets we would not whisper in the ear of our 
chosen friend? 



Men are always talking about truth, but there is really so 
little of it in common use that it might be classed with ra- 
dium. Perhaps we should not know it if we saw it, for our 
experience deals almost wholly with substitutes. 



In making up the character of God, the old theologians 
failed to mention that He is of an infinite cheerfulness. The 
omission has cost the world much tribulation. 



The only man that ever lived who understood and par- 
doned sin was Christ. And for this men have made him God. 



If you seek to command by fear, yours will be the barren, 
service that is given without the loyalty of the heart. 



EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 169 

Beginning as children, we walk away from God, and as 
old men we strive to totter back again. 



Grieve not that you desire always and vainly — life without 
desire is verv near unto death. 



Nature has no sorrows — perhaps that is why she is immor- 
tal. 



The better is enemy of the good, said William Morris. 
Do your stint to-day and let it go for what it is worth. All 
days are ranked equal in God's fair time. You can not steal 
from to-day to give unto to-morrow, nor play at loaded dice 
with the fates. 



I have come nearly to forty year, and have bothered my 
head much with books, yet I am as ignorant of many simple 
things as when a child. Still we are ready to fight and die for 
beliefs or opinions picked up at random in the space of a 
few years. Truly spoke the Preacher, all is vanity ! 



I am not the man I was ten years ago. I should not know 
the boy I was were I to meet him in the street. Time is ever 
stealing our outworn wardrobes of the flesh and spirit. 



Life is never simple to the divining spirit — every mo- 
ment of the common day is charged with mystery and revela- 
tion. 



To have nothing to say and to say it at all hazards, passes 
for much that is called achievement in literature. 



A man may boast that he can judge himself as harshly as 
another, but he makes no mistake in passing sentence. 



i7o PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

It is easier to make enemies than friends, but fail not to 
remember that an effort is required in either case. 



When I come to die I know my keenest regret will be that 
I suffered myself to be annoyed by a lot of small people and 
picayune worries, wasting God's good time with both. 



The strongest writer smiles at the praise of his strength- 
he alone knows how weak he can be. 



The very meanest man I know believes for sure that God 
is made in his particular image and likeness. 



The mystery of the Hereafter is very great indeed, but we 
may take courage in reflecting that we have left some of it 
behind us. 



The wounds of self bleed always and will not be forgiven. 



I need not write to my dear friend, for my heart talks to 
him every day over the miles. In this way, too, I tell him 
only the things I wish to tell him and so have nothing to 
change or recall after the letter is sealed and sent. I was not 
always so wise. 



Among persons whose lives touch at every point, there is 
often no communion of the soul for months and years. Were 
we to live only by the active life of the soul, our term would 
be as brief as that of the ephemera. 



Men are damned not for what they believe but for what 
they make-believe. 



Almost every friendship holds a degree of disappointment, 



EPIGRAMS AND APHORISMS 171 

yet friendship is still the best thing in the world and the con- 
stant dream of the finer souls. 



Sane persons will not expect to find absolute perfection in 
Heaven — there as here the charm of a little discontent, the 
satisfaction of turning up a small grievance, will not be de- 
nied us. 



The vice of the Pharisee is in believing that he is not like 
unto other men. The virtue of a man who knows himself a 
sinner is in believing that other men are not like unto himself. 



That which was lately power is now impotence, but wait ! 
it will soon be power again. 



It is something to have lived for the things of the mind, 
even though we have missed what the world calls wealth or 
success — those at least shall not be taken from us. 



Revise and revise and revise — the best thought will still 
come after the printer has snatched away the copy. 



Balzac laid the world under the greatest obligation of any 
modern man of letters and was driven into an untimely grave 
by the spectre of debt. The highest sen-ice is always martyr- 
dom. 



A learned young German philosopher, Dr. Otto Weinin- 
ger, pronounced the most acute mind since Kant, recently 
solved the great problem of sex and then killed himself. 
What else was there for him to do? 



Every little while it is announced that some scientist has 
pinned down the secret of life, but always the learned man 



172 



PALMS OF PAPYRUS 



has fooled himself. God will not be put into a chemical for- 
mula. 



Thou art eager to be in company and delightest in the 
conversation of thy friends, yet thou hast a better friend 
than any of these who constantly solicits thee and whom thou 
wilt seldom hear — thy soul ! 




Song of the Rain. 






ONG time I lay in my bed listening to the rain. 
In the hushed quiet of night, in the solemn 
darkness, my heart ceased its beatings to listen. 
There was naught in the world but my heart 
and the rain. 

My soul awoke at the song of the rain, drenching through 
the trees, pattering on the roof, filling my chamber with cool- 
ness and the sense of a mystic presence. My soul awoke and 
deemed that it was the pause before the End. 

Long I lay still in the darkness, hearing the song of the 
rain ; feeling upon me and throughout me the balm and 
blessing of the rain; telling myself that if this were the End, 
it could not better be. My soul was all attention, eager to 
catch the word of its fate, my heart ceased its throbbing to 
listen — there was naught in the world but the rain and my 
heart. 

What was the burden of the song of the rain that I heard 
as I lay still in my bed, wrapt in the solemn darkness, feel- 
ing as I shall feel in the pause before the End? What was 
the burden of the song of the rain which my soul awoke to 
hear and for which my heart stopped its beating? 

Peace was the burden of the song of the rain that I heard 
in the deep of night when my soul thrilled like a wind-harp 
in the breath of God. Peace was the burden of the song of 
the rain. 

Now have I put away all strife and anger and unrest since 
there came this wondrous message of the rain, the night and 
the silence : Now do I bear a quiet heart since my soul 
trembled like a wind-harp in the breath of God. 

Peace for all the days that yet are mine when often I shall 



1 74 PALMS OF PAPYRUS 

lie awake in the night silence, listening to the song of the 

rain. 

Peace forevermore when my soul shall be drawn into the 
breath of God and my body shall be mingled at last with the 
balm and blessing of the rain. 

Peace forevermore! 

Finis. 




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